In the chapter "The Lives of the Dead" in The Things They Carried, author Tim O'Brian suggests that reminiscing about the deceased in our stories and dreams enables us to ignore our inevitable mortality. He shows this when the soldiers tell each other stories after Lavender's death and when O'Brian himself dreams of Linda following her death. Dreaming of or telling stories about those who have passed away helps us disregard the certainty of death. In "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brian briefly touches on the topic of Ted Lavender's death. He states how following Lavender's assassination, Mitchell Sanders started talking to the dead body. Someone in the crew decided to imitate Lavender's voice, so Sander's conversation turned into a small story. …show more content…
In an aside, O'Brian explains his thoughts on the occurrence: "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness" (O'Brian 218). In this particular situation, O'Brian proclaims that stories help soldiers at war to cope with the inescapable reality of death, since the stories give them an "illusion of aliveness." This false sense of eternal life takes their mind away from the fact that the person in front of them has just passed away and, to some extent, even convinces the soldiers that killing is not unjust. Still, the quote emphasizes the idea that "others might . . . dream along with you" if we are to dream ourselves, suggesting that even the deceased could dream with us if we wanted them to. In other words, stories and dreams serve as a bridge between the living and the dead, causing the living to believe the dead actually live on forever.
Later on in the chapter, O'Brian reveals a personal experience where he himself used stories to cope with the death of a good friend. He discusses the story of Linda, his childhood crush who died from a brain tumor when both she and O'Brian were children. He states how he came up with his own stories and dreams about Linda to make it seem like she was not dead. O'Brian explains his views on these stories: "My dreams had become a secret meeting place, and in the weeks after she died I couldn't wait to fall asleep at night . . . I didn't want to lose Linda. She was dead, I understood that. After all, I'd seen her body. And yet even as a nine year old, I had begun to practice the magic of stories" (O'Brian 231). During this flashback, O'Brian realizes even he created his own stories to cope with the loss of someone he truly cared about. Linda's passing was so sudden and O'Brian was so young that he was not completely sure what to make of the tragedy. He knew that Linda was dead—he "understood that"—and yet he still refused to let her go. In order to keep Linda alive, O'Brian turned to the "magic of stories". Like I previously stated, stories and dreams serve as a bridge between the
living and the dead. O'Brian conveys the same message but in different words: "[His] dreams had become a secret meeting place" where he could meet with Linda, even after she has passed away. The "magic" of the stories and dreams he created allowed him to imagine that Linda was still alive. This is the "magic" that enables us to ignore our mortality. And what is special about this "magic" is that the stories we create can relate to anyone who has passed away: it could be anyone from our closest loved ones to our fallen enemies on the battlefield.
Linda was what kept Tim going throughout the book, even if only just her memory played a big role in his life. Dying from a brain tumor when they were just nine, she inspired him to keep fighting when life was hard. To him she was always nearby in spirit. He contended with her death by dreaming, and eventually used that in his later writing during struggles. These dreams and st...
The figurative language expresses emotions. Words can only classify emotions. However they are unfathomable and can only be expressed through “exaggerations”. To compare one self to the author’s feeling is the only way for the emotion to be understood. The repetition is used to show the struggle of letting go of the past. O’Brien becomes a writer and finds that he can’t let go so easily. He writes stories more than once to find a point in why it haunts him and why he must move on.
In a written story, the details are permanent. One can not will the words to change in every copy of the same story. The author’s words are fixed and how the author created the story is how the story will always go. While it is true a reader -- or even the author -- could create an alternate reality where the story divulges from the original plot, the people in the story are typically the same. In fact, the more people think about the character, the more the character seems to come alive. Tim O’Brien gave his fallen comrades and even his first love a second life in his novel. In the final chapter Linda says “Once you’re alive… you can’t ever be dead” (O’Brien 244). When a person is alive, they interact with a variety of individuals and become a central part in some of their memories. Those random encounters create a link to the living after they have passed away. The people remember and tell others of the fun
The interpretations of what comes after death may vary greatly across literature, but one component remains constant: there will always be movement. In her collection Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey discusses the significance, permanence and meaning of death often. The topic is intimate and personal in her life, and inescapable in the general human experience. Part I of Native Guard hosts many of the most personal poems in the collection, and those very closely related to the death of Trethewey’s mother, and the exit of her mother’s presence from her life. In “Graveyard Blues”, Trethewey examines the definition of “home” as a place of lament, in contrast to the comforting meaning in the epitaph beginning Part I, and the significance
"War is hell . . . war is mystery terror and adventure and courage and discovery and despair and . . . war is nasty (80)." When it all happened it was not like "a movie you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait (211)." O'Brien and the rest of the solders were just ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. They needed to tell blatant lies" to "bring the body and soul back together (239)." They needed to eliminate the reality of death. As ordinary people they were not capable of dealing with the engulfing realities of death and war therefore they needed to create coping skills. O'Brien approaches the loss of his childhood friend, Linda, in the same way he approaches the loss of his comrades in the war as this is the only way he knows how to deal with death. A skill he learned, and needed, in the Vietnam War.
This idea of memories being forgotten is when there is a mention of graves being lost in “Elegy for the Native Guard”. This is further reinforced in the line “All the grave markers, all the crude headstones – water-lost.” (44) While the poem does allude to the fact that these graves were destroyed due to natural causes, that of a hurricane, it is still significant. This poem demonstrates that society’s memory is not permanent, it can and will be lost
Death and Reality in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
The book order is chronologically in reverse; this is significant because as the reader one learns about his first experience with death in the last chapter of the book, "The Lives of the Dead". In this chapter, O’Brien illustrates the genuine love he felt for a girl named Linda. After his first official date with her, O’Brien clarifies to the reader that Linda was sick and eventually the reader learns that she has died from complications from a brain tumor. O’Brien portrays the feelings that he has as a fourth grader and the thoughts of death that he experiences. O’Brien expresses the feeling of disbelief, "It didn’t seem real. A mistake, I thought. The girl lying in the white casket wasn’t Linda. For a second I wondered if someone had made a terrible blunder" (241). O’Brien’s coping mechanism was to dream; he uses his memories to create dreams of real life situations that he and Linda could have easily been involved in. O’Brien uses situations like ice skating to make up elaborate stories to keep her memory alive (244). O’Brien as a child seems remote and solitary, so his mother asks “‘Timmy what wrong?’” and he replies, “‘Nothing I just need to sleep, that’s all’” (244). He understands she is dead but these intricate stories stuck with him, even through the war.
Throughout the lives of most people on the planet, there comes a time when there may be a loss of love, hope or remembrance in our lives. These troublesome times in our lives can be the hardest things we go through. Without love or hope, what is there to live for? Some see that the loss of hope and love means the end, these people being pessimistic, while others can see that even though they feel at a loss of love and hope that one day again they will feel love and have that sense of hope, these people are optimistic. These feelings that all of us had, have been around since the dawn of many. Throughout the centuries, the expression of these feelings has made their ways into literature, novels, plays, poems, and recently movies. The qualities of love, hope, and remembrance can be seen in Emily Bronte’s and Thomas Hardy’s poems of “Remembrance” “Darkling Thrush” and “Ah, Are you Digging on my Grave?”
People say the mind is a very complex thing. The mind gives people different interpretations of events and situations. A person state of mind can lead to a death of another person. As we all know death is all around us in movies, plays, and stories. The best stories that survive throughout time involve death in one form or another. For example, William Shakespeare is considered as one of the greatest writers in literary history known for having written a lot of stories concerning death like Macbeth or Julius Caesar. The topic of death in stories keeps people intrigued and on the edge of their seats. Edgar Allan Poe wrote two compelling stories that deal with death “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven.” In “The
Another reason stories are retold in The Things They Carried is to cope with the past and make the teller feel for the story again. For example, O’Brien retells Linda’s story to cope with her tragic death and make her seem alive again. In “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien explains that, when he retells a story where someone in it is deceased, “the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (225). Essentially, by retelling stories, the teller can summon people who have died in their past and make them seem not quite so
Owen then flashes forward in time describing how the death of the soldier still haunts his dreams; “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.” (Owen 696). He witnessed a man die before him, there wasn’t anything he could do to help him, and it still haunts the speaker. He describes how he saw “the white eyes writhing in his face,” (...
Death can both be a painful and serious topic, but in the hands of the right poet it can be so natural and eloquently put together. This is the case in The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe, as tackles the topic of death in an uncanny way. This poem is important, because it may be about the poet’s feelings towards his mother’s death, as well as a person who is coming to terms with a loved ones passing. In the poem, Poe presents a speaker who uses various literary devices such as couplet, end-stopped line, alliteration, image, consonance, and apostrophe to dramatize coming to terms with the death of a loved one.
As I grow older, I will attempt to create a life that I can look back on and think, “That was a life worth living.” Recently, my boyfriend’s grandfather passed away. He knew that his last day was near, but he kept saying that he was not sad, for he had lived a long full life (Matthew Morel, personal communication, February 2016). Contrarily, my grandmother, who is still living today, is obviously in a state of
Death is a natural and inevitable part of life. Everyone will experience death, whether it is of a loved one or oneself. In W.H. Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues” (1003), he describes such a catastrophic event and the drastic effect that it has on his life. It is interesting how people choose to accept this permanent and expected event, death. Similarly, Emily Dickinson has written many poems about death, such as “The last Night that She lived” (843), which describes a family waiting for a woman or girl to die and the dreary and depressed mood that exists within the household. Mourning is considered a perfectly healthy reaction when someone who is deeply loved and cared about passes on, and this is illustrated in “The Memory of Elena” (1070-71) by Carolyn Forche. She writes about the events following a funeral and also flashes back to the actual moment that a wife has watched her husband die. W.H Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” Carolyn Forche’s “The Memory of Elena,” and Emily Dickinson’s “The last Night that She lived” are all poems which share death as their subject matter, but differ in the fact that they discuss death in a unique style with a variety of literary devices to make them more effective.