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Things they carried literary device essay
Literary critique the things they carried by tim o'brien
Literary critique the things they carried by tim o'brien
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Judith Lewis Herman said, “People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy” (Trauma and Recovery). Both Slaughterhouse Five and The Things They Carried are filled with separated stories that, put together, comprise the novels. Many of the stories of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five are unchronological and contradictory. In The Things They Carried, the stories of the soldiers in Vietnam are more emotional. In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, war has various psychological effects on the characters; both World War II and the Vietnam War's psychological effects …show more content…
impacted the characters in the novels more than the physical and emotional effects.
To begin with, the idea of hallucination is prevalent in both novels but in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut leads the reader to believe that Billy Pilgrim is hallucinating and that that is what they are reading, a description of his hallucinations. This is a viable way to go about reading the novel but what Vonnegut is really intending the reader to grasp, is that fact that all these “hallucinations” are not hallucinations at all, but rather Billy’s way of using his imagination to cope with his experiences in the war. As seen in this quote, “His problems are directly related to his war experiences...He does not suffer from hallucinations. Rather, Billy's fantasies seem more the result of a vivid imagination that he uses as a sense making tool to deal with his war trauma” (Vees-Gulani 293). With its unchronological order of events, the novel makes it seem like Billy is hallucinating all these “random” events. Billy has an active imagination which he is using to try and understand his experiences in the war and that is what the novel is displaying with the strange retelling of these events. An example of these strange,
otherworldly stories is his Tralfamadorian experiences. A reason for why Billy is experiencing these events can be explained by the following quote, “The exposure to the trauma results in symptoms such as persistently reexperiencing the events in the form of distressing images, thoughts, perceptions, dreams, or reliving them. Being reminded of the event can also trigger psychological or physiological reactivity...These criteria for the diagnosis of PTSD help to explain and summarize the different facets of Billy's state of mind in the novel” (Vees-Gulani 294). (Block Quote?) Billy is reliving his experiences from the war throughout the novel. Billy has PTSD which makes him see all these thing from his past which can explain the layout of the novel along with the abnormalities of the stories. These stories show how bad the psychological effects of war can really be. Billy developed his PTSD from all the traumatic events that happened to him in the war as well as a few traumatizing events before the war like when he was thrown into a swimming pool by his father who was employing the sink or swim method.
The Things They Carried represents a compound documentary novel written by a Vietnam veteran, Tim O'Brien, in whose accounts on the Vietnam war one encounters graphical depictions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Thus, the stories "Speaking of Courage," "The Man I Killed," "How to Tell a True War Story," "Enemies" and "Friends," "Stockings," and "The Sweetheart of The Song Tra Bong "all encompass various examples of PTSD.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a story of Billy Pilgrim 's capture by the Nazi Germans during the last years of World War II. Throughout the narrative, excerpts of Billy’s life are portrayed from his pre-war self to his post-war insanity. Billy is able to move both forward and backwards through his life in a random cycle of events. Living the dull life of a 1950s optometrist in Ilium, New York, he is the lover of a provocative woman on the planet Tralfamadore, and simultaneously an American prisoner of war in Nazi Germany. While I agree with Christopher Lehmann-Haupt that Slaughterhouse-Five effectively combines fact and fiction, I argue that the book is more centralized around coping.
The human mind is a part of the body which current science knows little about. Trigger mechanisms, and other factors within the brain are relatively unknown to current humanity. Therefore, in order to produce a diagnostic on why Billy Pilgrim became “unstuck” in time, the reader of Slaughterhouse Five must come to terms with situations concerning the experiences described in the novel. Billy Pilgrim starts out, chronologically, as a fairly basic infantryman in the United States Army during the last Nazi offensive of the war, also known as the Battle of the Bulge (Vonnegut, 32). That battle resulted in fierce fighting, and also in massacres (such as the one that occurred near Malmedy, France), and the reader may be sure that there were men who became mentally unsound due to the effects of what they experienced there. Pilgrim is taken in by a group of soldiers who have found themselves behind the Nazi lines and are required to travel, by foot, back to friendly lines (Vonnegut, 32).
This independent reading assignment is dedicated to Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut experienced many hardships during and as a result of his time in the military, including World War II, which he portrays through the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim. Slaughterhouse-Five, however, not only introduces these military experiences and the internal conflicts that follow, but also alters the chronological sequence in which they occur. Billy is an optometry student that gets drafted into the military and sent to Luxembourg to fight in the Battle of Bulge against Germany. Though he remains unscathed, he is now mentally unstable and becomes “unstuck in time” (Vonnegut 30). This means that he is able to perceive
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five the main character Billy Pilgrim experiences few emotions during his time in World War II. His responses to people and events lack intensity or passion. Throughout the novel Billy describes his time travel to different moments in his life, including his experience with the creatures of Tralfamadore and the bombing of Dresden. He wishes to die during most of the novel and is unable to connect with almost anyone on Earth. The fictional planet Tralfamadore appears to be Billy’s only way of escaping the horrors of war, and acts as coping mechanism. Billy seems to be a soldier with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as he struggles to express feelings and live in his reality. At the beginning of the novel the narrator proposes his reason for writing the book is to explain what happened in the Dresden fire bombing, yet he focuses on Billy’s psyche more than the bombing itself. PTSD prevents Billy from living a healthy life, which shows readers that the war does not stop after the fighting is over and the aftermath is ongoing. Billy Pilgrim’s story portrays the bombing and war in a negative light to readers, as Vonnegut shows the damaging effects of war on an individual, such as misperception of time, disconnect from peers, and inability to feel strong emotions, to overall create a stronger message.
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the readers follow the Alpha Company’s experiences during the Vietnam War through the telling’s of the main character and narrator, Tim. At the beginning of the story, Tim describes the things that each character carries, also revealing certain aspects of the characters as can be interpreted by the audience. The book delineates what kind of person each character is throughout the chapters. As the novel progresses, the characters’ personalities change due to certain events of the war. The novel shows that due to these experiences during the Vietnam War, there is always a turning point for each soldier, especially as shown with Bob “Rat” Kiley and Azar. With this turning point also comes the loss of innocence for these soldiers. O’Brien covers certain stages of grief and self-blame associated with these events in these stories as well in order to articulate just how those involved felt so that the reader can imagine what the effects of these events would be like for them had they been a part of it.
Tim O’Brien wrote the novel The Things They Carried in 1990, twenty years after the war in Vietnam.In the novel,Obrien takes us through the life of many soliders by telling stories that do not go in chronical order. In doing so we get to see the physical and mental things the soldiers carry throughout the war in Vietnam.Yet the novel is more than just a description of a particular war. In the things they carried Tim O’Brien develops the characters in the book slowly, to show the gradual effect war has on a person. O’Brien shows this by exploring the life of Henry Dobbins, and Norman Bowker.
The Things They Carried is a classic because it approaches the gruesome subject of war in a way that is truly unique and honest. O’Brien’s unique point of view results in a book that is revered by the majority of its readers. “Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It’s always a woman. Usually it’s an older woman of kindly temperament and human politics. She’ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can’t understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked” (pg.65-66). Many soldiers come home from war and try to hide the brutality of war from the rest of the population. Tim O’Brien allows readers in on the horrid truth of war! Throughout the novel, Tim O’Brien depicts how his fellow platoon members are held captive by their subconscious minds. “He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and then shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo” (pg.75). It would be impossible for someone who has not experienced war to understand how the subconscious mind can imprison a soldier. However, O’Brien’s stories are so vivid that the reader feels that he or
There is a fine line between sanity and insanity, a line that can be crossed or purposefully avoided. The books The Things They Carried and Slaughterhouse-Five both explore the space around this line as their characters confront war. While O’Brien and Vonnegut both use repetition to emphasize acceptance of fate, their characters’ psychological and internal responses to war differ significantly. In The Things They Carried, the narrator and Norman Bowker carry guilt as evidence of sanity. In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim and the innkeepers carry on with life in order to perpetuate sanity. Both authors develop a distinct theme of responding in the face of the insanity of war.
Can troublesome war experiences really play a role in causing hallucinations? A hallucination is a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside of one’s mind. An individual who suffers from hallucinations is Billy Pilgrim. Billy, a person who can supposedly time travel, jumps between his time on the alien planet Tralfamadore, his experiences during World War II, and his captivity in a German prison camp. His hallucinations may have been caused by the airplane crash that damaged his brain. He believes that there is a planet named Tralfamadore, far from Earth, and that he has been kidnapped and taken there to be studied. Throughout the novel, Billy believes that what he sees is real while many others, like his daughter Barbara, get the impression that it is just Billy’s imagination. In the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the parallels between Billy’s Tralfamadore and his horrid experiences of war, as well as Tralfamadore's similarities to Kilgore Trout’s science fiction books show that Tralfamadore is just a figment of Billy’s imagination.
“Slaughterhouse-Five” is an anti-war novel. It describes a flesh-and-blood world. Main character is Billy Pilgrim, he is a time traveler in this book, his first name Billy is from the greatest novelist in the USA in 19 century’s novel “Billy Budd” ; and his last name is from “The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan. Differently, the main character in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” ’s traveling has meaning and discovering, Billy Pilgrim’s traveling just has violence and escape. In the novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut ’s main character, Billy Pilgrim is sane and his time travel is half in his mind half is real. He is looked so innocent and weakness, there is a sentence which is spoken by Billy Pilgrim “So it goes.” (2) This quotation shows that a poignant sense of helplessness.
In Slaughterhouse-five and The Things They Carried, death is a significant occurrence. Both books hold the belief that death is just a brief moment in time, that you will be alive far more often than you ever will be dead. When it comes to this idea of death, Billy Pilgrim embraces the idea of it. In The Things They Carried however, Tim cannot stand the idea of it and tries to wipe it completely from his mind. Billy’s acceptance of death portrays him to be much happier and at peace, while Tim’s rejection of it causes him to fall into a state of sadness and stress.
Who would have guessed that? Along with war comes experiences that many haunt a person or will never be able to let go of. 70% of adults in the U.S. have experienced a traumatic event (PTSDUnited). PTSD or Posttraumatic Stress Disorder comes home with many soldiers. Most of the time they can't make sense of what is going on and why they are acting the way they are. In the book Slaughterhouse-five Billy Pilgrim goes through many stages of PTSD. Back when World War II was happening doctors weren’t aware of PTSD. The majority of the time doctors just thought that their patients were going crazy, much like what Billy’s daughter was thinking about her father. Classical authors such as Vonnegut put in the element of Billy seeing aliens to make him seem crazy and people to wonder what was wrong with him, because in that time that was the strangest thing that could occur. PTSD is seen as a very large problem after many different situations such as rescuers after a fire, war, and the operators helping someone talk through a tough situation. This book is apart of the literary canon because it is real. It talks about real problems people have and makes it interesting, not only is it fun to read but it's eye opening to see what others
...agments came to be superior to adherence to the chronological narrative. This led to the violation of the boundary between the worlds of fiction and fact that otherwise resulted in ontological indeterminacy. Both Ghassemi and Vonnegut overthrow traditional moods of writing which tended to distinguish the world of fiction from that of reality, and construct reality through a unified closed system excluded of the different. Equipped to the techniques of intertextuality, metafiction, and self-refrentiality, both writers confirmed their postmodernist ideas which reject uniformity .In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut moves in a somehow similar path. His protagonist Billy Pilgrim is a man who doesn't "belong" to the world he has been thrown in. Billy is not a man of war so the only way that Vonnegut can help him endure sufferings and pains of war is to unstuck him in time.