國立成功大學
外國語文研究所
碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
National Cheng Kung University
A Thesis for Master of Arts
提姆‧歐布萊恩《負荷》中的"三類講說" : 創傷治療、無聲語言與
敘事美學
Three Discourses in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried:
Traumatic Therapy, Inaudible Words, and
Aesthetics
指導教授: 金傑夫 博士
Advisor: Dr. Jeff Johnson
研究生: 鍾蕎鈴
Graduate Student: Chiao-Ling Chung
中華民國一○二年六月
June, 2013
提姆‧歐布萊恩《負荷》中的"三類講說" : 創傷治療、無聲語言、敘事美學
Three Discourses in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried: Traumatic Therapy,
Inaudible Words, and Aesthetics
摘要
提姆‧歐布萊恩的《負荷》是描寫一羣經歷越戰的士兵在戰爭中及戰爭前後
內在心理的一部小說。雖然這是一本以戰爭為題材的小說，但我們似乎感覺不到
血腥與殘暴的氛圍，因為在小說的內容裡，不見英雄主義的擴張，刑拷的情節與
殺戮的場景，作者的講述方式另讀者著迷。然而，當我們專注於作者的講說時，
我們發現諾曼‧包克(Norman Bowker)正忍受著無法陳訴戰爭創傷的痛苦與折
磨，包克不間斷的開車環繞著湖泊十二次，沒有勇氣向任何人講述他的戰爭故
事，導致最後走向自殺一途。說出自己的戰爭創傷具有自我「創傷治療」的功能，
因為創傷須要語言來達到「發洩」的作用，讓他/她在面對創傷情緒累積過剩之
時，可以遠離創傷無助感。假如包克能說出他的創傷重擔，他的命運也許就會有
所不同。而小說中的另一位角色，提姆‧歐布萊恩(Tim O’Brien)則是遭遇「無聲
言語」(或稱「凝視的講述」)之苦。「凝視的講述」來自於「大他者」的意志－
「超我」或作者的良心，歐布萊恩曾嘗試當一位逃兵，因為加入越戰違背了他的
意志，但「超我」的權威是如此的強大，以致歐布萊恩最終還是加入了戰爭。在
閱讀這部小說時，我們不自覺的順應作者的欲望，自在且感性的跟隨著作者，去
感受小說中的每一章節，作者運用敘事的藝術帶著我們去經歷戰爭中的光明面，
像是愛、友誼及情感。倚賴「感性的戰爭講述」技巧，作者讓戰爭小說不感沉重。
感性的戰爭講述降低了我們的理性並喚起我們的感性，它讓讀者對戰爭小說較不
感畏懼，且更有意願開書閱讀。但以戰爭為題材的小說終究無法達到提昇讀者的
目的，因為戰爭與道德無關。畢竟，這是一部關於歷史創傷的戰地小說。
關鍵詞：創傷治療，發洩，凝視的講述，大他者，超我，感性的戰爭講述
Abstract
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a war novel describing the story as
well as the inner psyche of a group of soldiers during and after the Vietnam War.
Although this is a war novel, it is neither bloody nor violent. There are no great acts
of heroism, senses of torture, or scenes of slaughter. However, while we are drawn in
by the author’s story, we find that one of the soldiers, Norman Bowker, is suffering
from the pain of being unable to speak about the horrors of war that he has witnessed.
Norman drives around the lake twelve times, has no capacity to talk about his war
story with others, and commits suicide in the end. Speaking out about war traumatic
experiences serves as a kind of traumatic therapy because a traumatic situation can be
discharged through language, making it possible to avoid feelings of helplessness in
the face of an accumulation of excitation. If Bowker could speak out his traumatic
burden, his destiny might have been different. Tim O’Brien, another character who
shares the author’s name suffers from the inaudible words we can term
gaze-discourses deriving from his conscience and the will of the Other－the superego.
He once tried to be a draft-dodger, as he disagreed with the Vietnam War, yet the
superego is so powerful that O’Brien eventually joins the war. When reading this war
novel, we naturally let the author guide us with his desires, and we freely follow him
to feel the scenes and emotions conveyed in every chapter. He takes us to experience
the love, friendship, and emotions with his narrative art in this war story. Using a
Sentimental War Discourse, the author creates a war novel that is not so heavy that
helps alleviative our fears and makes us want to read more of this war novel.
Nevertheless, it is not necessarily effective at actually uplifting readers, as this is
irrelevant to the moral of the story. After all, it is a war novel about historical trauma.
Keywords: traumatic therapy, discharge, gaze-discourses, the Other, the superego,
Sentimental War Discourse
Table of Contents
Chapter One ………………………………………………………………….….. 1
Introduction
Chapter Two ……………………………………………………………………... 10
Discourse of Traumatic Therapy
Chapter Three ……………………………………………………………..…….. 37
Discourses of Inaudible Words
Chapter Four……………………………...………...……………………………. 53
Discourse of Aesthetics
Chapter Five ……………………………………………………………..……...... 67
Conclusion
Works Cited …………………………………………………………………..…... 73
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Chapter One
Introduction
Tim O’Brien and The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien, who was born in Minnesota in 1946, is an American writer. He
graduated from Macalester College in 1968, and in the same year, he received his
draft notice and was sent to Vietnam. He left Vietnam in 1970 and then began his
writing career. His war memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me
Home, was released in 1973. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in
1979 for Going After Cacciato. However, his most best-known work is The Things
They Carried, a novel about the Vietnam War in 1990 which won the French Prix du
Meilleur Livre Étranger. This work is difficult to classify because it mixes fiction and
autobiography. O’Brien did not agree with much of the portrayal of the Vietnam War
in the medis and writes his book from the viewpoint of a person who really
experienced the war. The author thinks that, for him, “there’s no ugly person or ugly
situation [in war]” (Writing and War). As a novel, he uses beautiful language to
“elevate human suffering” because literature “is a part of being human”. The author
also hopes that when the readers read the novel, they could find his ghost in those
pages. He says “…sees my best self and the man I wish I can be for you [Arlington
Reads]”, then “call it [the ghost] pride and call it [the ghost] love”. Tim O’Brien hope
that the readers can found his spirit of writing this book, and at the same time they can
see this spirit brings the feeling of pride and love rather than ugly and immoral while
they are reading this war novel.
The History of the Vietnam War
In 1954, the Geneva Conference formally divided Vietnam into North and
South Vietnam. North Vietnam was led by Ho Chi Minh, and Ngo Dinh Diem became
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the president of the Republic of Southern Vietnam in 1955. The Soviet Union
proposed permanent division and supported Communist North Vietnam. The U.S.,
however, rejected the proposal and offered South Vietnam military and financial
assistance out of fear that Communism would spread over the region. The following
year, the U.S. military took over the training of South Vietnamese armed forces. In
1957, fighting broke out between North and South Vietnam. In 1961, President
Kennedy approved sending Special Forces (Air Force) to South Vietnam. But in the
fall of 1964, the South Vietnam government was overthrown and Diem was killed in a
military coup. After that, about one hundred fifty thousand Viet Cong (Vietnam
Communist soldiers) held sway over the South Vietnamese, and the South Vietnam
government lost the control of nearly half of its countryside. In 1964, North Vietnam
and the Viet Cong saw the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as a declaration of war by the
Americans. In November of the same year, the Viet Cong surprisingly attacked the
American air bases in South Vietnam, and four Americans were killed. In February of
1965, the Viet Cong attacked a U.S. military compound, killing eight Americans. In
March of the same year, U.S. ground troops were approved to join the war. Three
thousand five hundred American ground troops landed in South Vietnam, and
between 1965 and 1968, U.S. troops began the jungle war with the Viet Cong. In May
of 1969, U.S. forces reached their peak at five hundred forty-three thousand, and
nearly thirty-three thousand Americans were killed. In May of the same year, peace
talks opened in Paris, and in 1968, Richard Nixon, who promised to end the war in
Vietnam, won election. The greatest anti-war demonstrations in U.S. history took
place in December in 1968. As a result, President Nixon ordered an extra fifty
thousand soldiers out of Vietnam. In 1970, he announced the withdrawal of another
one hundred fifty thousand Americans from Vietnam, and the number of U.S. troops
in Vietnam was reduced to three hundred thirty-five thousand. In 1972, the last U.S.
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combat unit left South Vietnam, and a peace agreement was signed in the following
year in Paris, formally ending the Americans’ war in Vietnam. But American military
personnel remained until Saigon fell if 1975.
Summary of The Things they Carried
The title The Things They Carried is symbolic on different levels. In the first
chapter, the narrator describes the things his companions carry. The things he
describes are visible materials, yet some soldiers not only carry visible things but also
invisible ones－psychical burdens and war traumas. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries
Marsha’s (his love) letters. He often unwraps her letters and imagines when he can
someday see her again. Nevertheless, after Lavender’s death, he burns Martha’s
letters, which may serve to remind him that Marsha and he are two people in totally
different places. In the chapter “On the Rainy River”, the author relates a story about
the time before Tim O’Brien joined the war. During the summer of 1968, Tim O’Brien
receives his draft notice. O’Brien is a modest anti-war person. He thinks that, as a
college student, he is too good to be a soldier. Without telling his family, he flees to
the boundary between Canada and the U.S. He lives in the Tip Top Lodge, which is
run by Elroy Berdahl, an old man. He spends six days getting along with him. Elroy
never asks O’Brien anything about his history. However, the narrator describes Elroy
as a man who is quiet yet whose gaze could slice O’Brien open. On the sixth day at
the Tip Top Lodge, Elroy takes O’Brien fishing. On the Rainy River, Elroy stops the
boat, and the shoreline of Canada is just twenty yards ahead of them. O’Brien bursts
into tears but does not say anything. Elroy then turns the boat back to Minnesota.
O’Brien leaves Tip Top Lodge and joins the Vietnam War. In “Enemies”, Dave Jensen
and Lee Strunk fight with each other over a jackknife, then in the following chapter
“Friends”, they learn to trust each other and become good companions. They make an
agreement that if one gets seriously hurt, the other will kill him to end his misery.
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Aside from the friendship of soldiers in war, the author mentions a woman character
in the war field. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, Mary Ann is brought into the
war field by her boyfriend Mark Fossie, a younger medic. She is a fast learner who
learns about Vietnamese culture and even takes part in ambushes. Before Mary Ann
comes toVietnam, the couple loves each other and plans to get married. However,
after Mary Ann becomes an insider in the war, their common understanding is broken.
Mary Ann chooses to leave the war, and she then disappears in the Vietnamese
mountains forever. In the chapter “Speaking of Courage”, the author proposes his
definition of courage. Norman Bowker goes back to his hometown in Iowa after the
war. He often drives his father’s Chevy around the streets, and he even drives around
a lake aimlessly twelve consecutive times. He says that he is looking for the war. He
is eager to talk about the war with others, especially his father. He imagines that he
has a talk with his father, telling him that he is not very brave and that he lost his
friend, Kiowa, on the battlefield because of the unbearable smell of shit. Nevertheless,
he never really have this conversation with his father. Bowker is a winner of seven
medals, and perceived heroism makes it impossible for him to talk to others about his
pain of losing Kiowa. Finding no people with whom to talk, Bowker commits suicide
three years after returning, becoming the only character who dies from his war trauma.
In “In the Field” and “Field Trip”, the author uses the same place (the site of Kiowa’s
death) to tell us two similar stories; the story told in “In the Field” happened in the
past, and the one in “Field Trip” is in the book’s present (twenty years later). In “In
the Field”, the author describes how Jimmy Cross leads the platoon to find Kiowa’s
body and thinks that he has made a mistake in letting his men camp on the dangerous
riverbank. Then, in “Field Trip”, the author describes Tim O’Brien coming to the field
twenty years later with his daughter, Kathleen, to recall the scene of Kiowa’s death
and his complicated emotions towards it. In the last chapter, “The Lives of Death”, the
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author tells his readers about Tim O’Brien’s first date with his beautiful schoolmate,
Linda, and the circumstances of her death. Then, in the last two pages of this novel,
Tim O’Brien tells us that he is now forty years old and has become a writer. He
reviews his personal history, from his childhood to his experiences in the war and his
life after the war, and then tells us that his comrades will never die, for they still
sometimes appear in his mind.
Thesis Structure
This thesis examines the attributes of the “traumatic narratives” in Tim
O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. In the novel, Tim O’Brien contains three layers,
including: the author (the actual writer, #1), the author’s surrogate who narrates the
novel (the narrator, #2), and the soldier who sometimes appears in the novel’s action
(the character, #3). The author says that he does not see this novel as a form of
therapy, but we see that he discharges his traumatic war burden by writing this novel.
The author seemingly tells us his comrades’ traumatic war stories, yet we find that the
stories he tells may be his own. Besides, other characters, such as Norman Bowker
and Lieutenant Timmy Cross, are sometimes hinted to be or to represent aspects of
the author. He creates the characters in the novel in order to release his war traumas. It
is sometimes difficult to distinguish which parts are true and which parts are
fabricated. For instance, we think we are reading a war story, but the author tells us
that the novel he writes is a love story. “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. But
you can’t say that. All you can do is to tell it one more time, patiently, adding and
subtracting, making up a few things to get at real truth” (85). Therefore, the narrating
style of this war novel is romantic, filled with imagination, concerned with love, and
wandering between truth and fiction.
Chapter One, “Discourses of Traumatic Therapy,” claims that discourse－to
speak out about one’s trauma－has the function of therapy because war trauma needs
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to be discharged and transferred through language. According to Freudian theory,
discharge is how human beings deal with unpleasant or melancholic emotions
deriving from conflicts in the mental apparatus. In this context, language is the
medium of discharge. In this chapter, we see that Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, and
Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) are the three characters whom we can employ to
illustrate the differences between the urge to discharge or not to discharge one’s own
inner trauma. In the chapter “Speaking of Courage”, Bowker often drives around in
search of the war in his hometown. He expects someone will talk about the war with
him, yet he cannot find anybody to talk to. The entire content of this chapter involves
Norman driving around the lake. The landscape of lake is vivid and pleasant when he
thinks of spending lovely days with his friends before the war. By contrast, the
scenery is entirely different when he thinks about his horrible war experiences. The
entire content of this chapter involves Norman driving around the lake. The landscape
of lake is vivid and pleasant when he thinks of spending lovely days with his friends
before the war. By contrast, the scenery is entirely different when he thinks about his
horrible war experiences. The landscape he sees does not change; only the condition
of Bowker’s psyche is changing. Driving silently and repeatedly around the lake,
Bowker makes up “conversations” relating to his traumas in Vietnam War and
imagines that he is talking to his father. But he ultimately does not tell his war
traumas to anybody. Having no discourse to discharge his pain, Bowker hangs himself
three years after returning from the Vietnam War. In contrast to Norman, Rat knows
how to express his sadness and anger to others through language. He discharges his
war trauma not only through words, but also by body languages, such as gestures and
behaviors. He discharges his pressure by writing, speech, and action. Even though he
gets no feedback from others, he releases his war trauma through these acts. Tim
O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) is the luckiest person of the three. He discharges his
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war traumas by writing the book we read. He conveys his war traumas by telling the
stories about the characters in the book. Furthermore, after the book was published, he
received responses from his readers.
Chapter Two, “Discourses of the Invisible Words”, deals with the
gaze-discourses which Tim O’Brien suffers from before he joins the Vietnam War.
The gaze-discourses mean human beings’ imagination resulting from the significance
of the Other (the speech from the community), God or the gods (the religious
discipline, commandment, or precept), the Father (the person who is always in our
mind), and the conscience. In other words, they are discourses deriving from human
minds. In the novel, O’Brien chooses to be a draft-dodger to obeying gaze-discourses
deriving from his conscience. We know O’Brien does not want to join the war and
even considers war to be immoral. But the conscience is only one kind of
gaze-discourse in human mind. There are other gaze-discourses from the Other, God
or Father also delivers their speeches in our mind. In the novel, the old man, Elroy is
the emblem of the Father or Tim O’Brien’s conscience, and the townspeople are the
Other. We see Tim O’Brien’s dilemma between the different gaze-discourses, his pain,
and even his weakness. O’Brien falls into a condition of “moral confusion” (40) as a
draft-dodger. O’Brien is an autonomous person who not only listens but also thinks
independently and inquires about whether the voices coming from the community
(those townspeople who are the heteronomous ones) are correct or not. He knows that
the true audience in his life is the old man (the Father, or his conscience, which
represents “morality”) not the townspeople (the Other, which embarrasses him).
Nevertheless, he chooses to obey the Other in the end. The will of the Other
constructs the superego, which is so powerful that O’Brien, after fleeing to the
boundary between Canada and America for only six days, cannot help obeying the
Other, leaving the old man to go to the war.
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Chapter Three, “Discourses of the Narrative Art” in this novel, proposes that the
author creates what we can call Sentimental War Discourse, because it is similar to the
Sentimentalism that prevailed in the eighteenth century. The novel uses a writing style
relating to imagination, romantic words, and sensibility (love, care, sympathy, lament,
and so on and so forth). We read a romantic story about a young man named Curt
Lemon who is taken away by sunlight, with scenery of vines and white blossoms, and
an extremely imaginative story about the six soldiers who hear the voice of “the
moral” (76) in the mountain. Furthermore, the author displays care and harmony in
“Friendship”, tells us a love story of Jimmy Cross and Marsha in “Love”, and
mentions friendliness and good in “Church”. These subjects relating to sensibility of
human nature are interspersed in this war novel. The author’s approach coincidentally
corresponds to Kant’s aesthetic judgments. The author understands that war material
is hard to relate to the “good” (in Kant’s theory), or the judgment of whether
something is ethical or moral. He therefore finds another approach－the “agreeable”
(in Kant’s theory), which is a purely sensory judgment based on inclination alone－to
represent the war novel. In other aspects, the Sentimental War Discourses serve to
minimize our ability to distinguish right from wrong and good from evil, which
further contributes to its accessibility to readers. The sentimental speeches
successfully decrease our sense and increase our sensibility, so then we read the novel
with sensory judgment alone. Traumatic war stories are doomed to involve the tension
between history and story and between reality and fiction. In “In the Field”, the author
mentions about the terms－“story-truth” and the “happening-truth”. The approach of
telling the “story-truth”, which was the war story happened in the past, is narrated by
the narrator (#2), and the “happening-truth”, which concerns a forty-three-year writer
suffering from his invisible responsibility and grief by the actual writer (#1). Two
stories are told by the different view points offering readers more information to feel
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and see the war novel. Perhaps, the author prefers us to read the “happening-truth”
rather than the “story-truth”. By following the author’s will, we, the readers, may
arrive at a truth which is much closer to the author’s aim of writing this novel.
9
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Chapter Two
Discourse of Traumatic Therapy
In “Speaking of Courage”, Tim O’Brien makes use of the whole chapter to
describe Norman Bowker’s life after the Vietnam War, circumstantially recounting
Norman’s behaviors and his psyche. The contents provide us with some clear clues
about why, in the later chapter, “Note”, Norman hangs himself in a small room in his
hometown YMCA. Norman does not know how to discharge his war trauma, and in
the long run he chooses to commit suicide to end his sense of helplessness. According
to Freudian theory, trauma is a strong harrowing impression or an abnormal
displeasure in people’s memories, and a traumatic situation is an “experience of
helplessness in the face of an accumulation of excitation that cannot be discharged”
(Evans 10). Discharge is a psychoanalytical term which was first employed by
Sigmund Freud. It is how the psychical apparatus deals with excitation when
“unpleasure originates in the conflicts and splits in the mental apparatus” (Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, 54). In other words, it is a release of melancholic emotions.
Language is the medium for discharging of people’s psychical excitation. Speaking
out about traumatic war experiences serves as a kind of traumatic therapy, as war
traumas need to be discharged through language.
Norman is a quiet boy, but this “quietness” hampers him from speaking out
about his horrible experience. After the Vietnam War, quiet Norman drives
repeatedly around the lake in his small hometown, trying to figure out which of his
friends he can talk to, making up dialogues with his father and imagining the
responses he will receive when his father heard his war stories. Nevertheless, his
myriad attempts to tell his war story to others are finally in vain. After driving around
the lake twelve times, he ends up wading in the lake with his clothes on to end the
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repetitive driving. Throughout this time, he is unable to speak out about his trauma.
Driving the car and circling the lake gives us an image of a man rowing a boat with
trauma with the intention of crossing a sad river. This traumatic boat, unable to cross
the river and unable to seek assistance from others, finds no place to go and thus
keeps “floating” on the sad river. Norman describes himself as “[a] guy who can’t get
his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place
to go …” (O’Brien 157). In this process, the death drive has been gradually incepted
in his psyche. Consequently, his silence becomes one of the reasons for his suicide.
In the army, soldiers carry their personal things, and what they choose to carry
is determined by their particular temperaments. For example, Ted Lavender, who
carries tranquilizers, easily gets upset; Rat Kiley, who carries comic books, tends to
have an exaggerated and overstated manner; and Kiowa, who carries a New
Testament, is a devout Baptist. “Norman Bowker carried a diary” (3). Norman is fond
of writing in his diary, which may symbolize that he does not like to talk. He is
dedicated to discourse (more than the others), but discourse with and for himself, not
aimed at others. Therefore, carrying a diary might imply that he prefers to confide in
a diary, which cannot give any response, rather than his comrades in the battle. After
the war, he is still quiet, whether he is with his family or in his hometown. His mother
says, “‘Norman was a quiet boy’… ‘and I don’t suppose he wanted to bother
anybody’” (160). There are many possible reasons for his quietness, but regardless of
what the true sources are, it is clear that Norman needs to speak out with his voice in
order to release his anxiety. He is both quiet but afraid of the quietness at the same
time: “What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me” (18) and “No man,
go on. One thing I hate, it’s a silent Indian” (19). After Ted Lavender dies, Norman
and Kiowa have a talk about his death. Suddenly, Kiowa stops talking. The silent
atmosphere upsets Norman who nervously and eagerly forces Kiowa to say more. Ted
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Lavender’s death brings about a huge fear in him. He really wants to say something
about Lavender’s death with the others, yet he is incapable of doing so.
After the war, Norman comes back to his hometown. He keeps on looking for
traces of the war. We can see that, although the war is over in the outer world, it
continues in his psyche. In Norman’s post-war life he continuously changes jobs in
search of the same excitement that the war gave him. Norman works as an automotive
salesman, a janitor, a car washing attendant, and a short-order cook, but none of these
jobs lasted more than ten weeks. He left so quickly because nobody would mention
the war in those jobs. He even enrolled in a junior college, but dropped out after eight
months because there were “certainly not the stakes of war” (155). Actually, Norman
needs to hear voices talking about the war. Ironically, the townspeople avoid
mentioning the war out of fear that it would displease him. His parents treat him
kindly and make a point to never mention the war in his presence, unaware that this
attempt at kindness actually has the opposite effect. Norman cannot find traces of the
war around him, so he begins looking for it in his own imagination. He imagines the
conversation with his father－“‘I almost won the Silver Star,’ he would have said.
‘How’s that?’ ‘Just a story.’ ‘So tell me’, his father would have said” (141-2). He
craves to talk about the war with his father on many occasions, but he doesn’t have
the courage to make it happen in the real world. Therefore, Norman’s persistent
silence could be attributed to the fact that there are no war issues around him, and he
consequently feels that he has no choice but to live in his own imagination and
separate from reality. Norman’s psyche stagnates in the time of the war which results
in the gap between his psyche and the outward reality. Keeping himself removed from
reality results in a feeling of helplessness. Without the townspeople’s love and care,
Norman’s “traumatic situation” is getting worse.
In the beginning of this lake driving journey, the scenery is vivid and pleasant.
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The lake he sees at this time is “a graceful, good-size lake” because “there [is not] a
war” (138). He thinks of the lovely days with Max, who is fond of talking philosophy
with him, and Sally, his sweetheart in high school. However, the scenery swiftly
becomes dim and deathly when his horrible war experiences emerge in his mind. His
happy lake driving journey then becomes painful and unbearable. Bowker seems to
attempt to fight the situation he faces and want to return to the days when he spent
time with Max and Sally. “The town seemed remote somehow” (139), for his best
friend, Max, was dead, his high school sweetheart, Sally, had gotten married, and
most of his former friends had already left the town. Realizing that he cannot go back
to his high school life, he subsequently thinks of the war, which makes him think of
the men whom he could not save, and the definition of true courage. In the end, a
range of passive emotions dominate Norman’s mind. He drives from morning to
evening, seeing “hopelessly, around and around, a rotating sprinkler” (146), and
considering that “prairie had been baked dry … it would get worse”. The scenery now
presents deathly stillness. The author uses the words: “hopeless and worse”. Such a
comparative writing skill hints to us that war experiences make a happy and innocent
boy become an anxious, a pessimistic and a gloomy person.
Maybe Norman does not know how to talk, or perhaps he simply does not want
to speak out. In this context, the only thing left is to blindly repeat the same action
again and again. Lacking language abilities with which to communicate with the town
people, Norman cannot connect the ego (his consciousness) with the superego (the
will of the community). Here, the will of the community represents the reality
principle. The superego is absent from Norman’s psyche, so reality is lacking, too.
The traumatic image in the psyche will stay static if the real (the outward reality) is
immobilized. People who have experienced trauma need the constant sensation of the
reality, which can promote their psyches to move with the outward world. The best
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medium which can mediate the imaginary and the reality is language－words which
mean “talking” and “saying”. According to Lacanian theory, “there’s an
anxiety-provoking apparition of an image which summarizes what we can call the
revelation of that which is least penetrable in the real, of the real lacking any possible
mediation, of the ultimate real, …” ( Seminar II, 164). Nevertheless, there are no
people with whom he can bring himself to converse. Norman thus finds no way to
discharge his traumatic war experiences. There are no channels for him to discharge
his psychical repression. Therefore, he talks to his father in his imagination: “‘If you
don’t want to say any more－’ ’I do want to’” (O’Brien 143). All in all, Norman
seems to lose his ability to communicate with his community. The reality gradually
disappears from mind. He cannot speak out about his trauma, as this would interrupt
the communication with the town. As a result, Norman is trapped in an endless
helpless condition, namely the “traumatic situation”.
Aside from Norman’s natural quietness, what is it that stops his communication
with reality? In “Speaking of True Courage”, the author portrays the progress of
Kiowa’s death. “He would’ve talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the
boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone” (149). Meanwhile,
he also reveals Norman’s self-condemnation, regret, and shame about Kiowa’s death.
“I couldn’t take that goddamn awful smell” (143). We can infer that maybe Kiowa’s
death has something to do with Norman, as he was unable to bear the smell and pull
Kiowa out of the field. Norman, however is a man who possesses seven medals.
Normally, it would be impossible for him to lose his comrade just because of the
smell of human waste. However, there is sometimes a thin line between courage and
cowardice, illustrated by Norman’s description that “sometimes you were very brave
up to the point and then beyond that point you were not so brave” (147). Norman is a
war hero. It goes without saying that “bravery” absolutely occupies an irreplaceable
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15
place in his life. How can he lose his comrade just because of the unbearable smells?
How can he be a coward who is afraid of the smell of feces? Furthermore, how could
he admit such a dishonor and cause embarrassment to his hometown people? Norman
possesses the characteristics of a great man. We can infer that he himself also looks
down on such behavior and must consider that it will defame his reputation as a hero.
This, perhaps, is why he cannot talk about the war; that is, maybe he feels guilty
about Kiowa’s death and in some respects does not want to reveal that he is not as
brave as others believe. He may consider that, had he been able to put up with the
smell, Kiowa might have been saved by him. Therefore, his inability to speak out
about his war trauma may be due to his high standard regarding “courage”, namely
his heroism, or his sense of guilt.
If there is any person whom Norman is willing to talk with, that person should
be his father. We see Norman imagining that he is telling the story of the “shit field”
to his father. Even though Norman often imagines conversations such as these, he just
cannot raise the courage to talk about the war with his father. He likely wants to talk
with his father about the war because he believes that his father will give him comfort
or some advice to help him release his pressure. However, there is also the possibility
that his father is the person who put pressure on him. Perhaps he cares too much
about his father’s judgments, and he is afraid that this incident would erase his heroic
image in his father’s mind. Norman seems to have psychological obstacles preventing
him from showing his weakness to his father. We do not know the real reason for this,
but Norman’s desire to talk to his father is quite obvious.
Aside from his father, he also imagines the possible results after telling the
townspeople about the “shit field”. Maybe they would feel disgusted, maybe he
would be filled with embarrassment, maybe they would look down on his cowardly
behavior, and maybe he would become a laughingstock to them. He tries to discover
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all the possible situations and reactions that he would encounter. He thinks about this
again and again, finally deciding that he would not talk to anyone about that incident.
Norman thinks that the “shit field” incident does not belong to a real war. He thinks
“it was not a war for war stories, or for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to
know about the terrible stink” (150). This is certainly true. When people think of the
grand historical stories of war, the images which immediately come to mind generally
portray the glorious missions, the valorous heroes, or the honorable deeds. Just as
Norman says, no one is interested in a war story about a soldier who struggles with
facing the stench of human waste on a battlefield. In Norman’s point of view, he
might become an ironic character in the town, and this makes him determined to keep
this incident secret, instead safely and quietly driving around the lake and letting the
lake become “a good audience for silence” (138).
Driving repeatedly around the lake represents that Norman has no ability to
come out of the pain of the war trauma via the use of language. When a person
repeatedly does the same behavior for a period of time, it implies that he/she is eager
to find a way out of the perplexing, uneasy or the suffering situation that he/she is
encountering. The Lacanian Graph of Desire, which is shown below, offers a useful
psychoanalytical theory to explain such repeated behavior.
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s(A)
A
Voice
Signifier
i(a)
m
I(A)
Figure 1
17
$
The graph of desire － complete graph
Source: Ecrits.
A
= the Other
i (a)
= the specular image
I(A)
= the ego-ideal
s(A)
= the signification of the Other
m
= the ego
$
= the barred subject
The operation of the Graph of Desire represents the constitution of a human
subject and his desire. The horizontal line, called the “signifying chain”, begins in the
signifier (a linguistic sign) and progresses to voice (a linguistic meaning). The media
to keep progressing is “language”. The two intersections of the graph are the Point de
Capition (quilting point), in which “signified and signifier are knotted together”
(Seminar. Ⅲ 268). That is to say, if the signified and the signifier cannot be combined,
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“the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement of the signification” (Ecrits, 303).
The horseshoe-shaped line, known as the vector of desire, represents the vector of the
subject’s intention. The triangle, above the barred subject ($), is the beginning point
of the vector. It symbolizes the desire, which is the pure and eternal psychological
need of every human being to reach the ego-ideal－the guide to internalize the social
law in human subjects. Therefore, the Graph of Desire operates as a circuit in which
the subject trails the vector of desire and moves naturally from the desire to the
specular image 1 (i(a)), the ego 2 (m), and at last to the destination, the ego-ideal 3
(I(A)). Nevertheless, if the switch of the Point de Capition is turned off, the operation
of the signifying chain will stop, and then the circuit in the vector of desire will bring
to an end the quilting point. Lacan describes it as "logical moments" in the birth of a
speaking human subject.
Norman cannot reach the ego or even the ego-ideal, for he does not actually
speak out his traumatic story to anyone, instead just imagining it in his mind.
Therefore, every round of the lake driving symbolizes every meaningless start of the
vector of desire. According to Lacanian theory, trauma is the pain which is caused by
experiences in life. It occurs when the human subject does not know how to release it
and there is no one who can help him/her to transfer it. Unfortunately, the traumatic
experience will re-present itself again and again in our consciousness and
unconsciousness. Nevertheless, this does not mean that we are unable to do anything
about our trauma, for it can be decreased or even cured through discharge and
transference. In the Graph of Desire, the traumatic subject passes by the specular
1
Specular image (i(a)) refers to the image of oneself which is the same with the other in the imaginary.
The other represents each member who constructs the Other (the community). The ego in the
imaginary is first formed by the identification of the specular image.
2
The ego (m) is the counterpart of the specular image in the reality. Human beings construct their egos
in the reality with the specular image by language.
3
“The ego-ideal is the signifier operating as ideal, an internalized plan of the law, the guide governing
the subject’s position in the [reality]” (Even 52). Therefore the ego-ideal (I(A)) means the ego which is
limited by the law in the reality.
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image (i(a)) to build ego in the imaginary order. Next, it passes through the defile of
the signifying chain by the medium of languages so as to construct the ego (m) in the
symbolic order. Finally, it arrives at the aim of the ego-ideal (I(A)) to link with the
reality. The whole progress aims at moderating the inner psyche and the outer reality.
Such a temperate process discharges a person’s trauma by balancing the condition
between the psyche and reality. In this process, language, namely “talking” and
“saying”, is the medium. Norman repeatedly drives around the lake. Every round
symbolizes a new round of the vector of desire staring from the triangle. Nevertheless,
lacking people with whom he can talk, Norman finds no way to discharge his
traumatic war experiences. In other words, he does not use language to force the
signifying chain to continue operating, so the circuit stops in the quilting point of the
Other (A) in the Graph of Desire.
In Norman’s letter to Tim O’Brien, he describes himself as, “This guy [who]
wants to talk it, but he can’t” (O’Brien 157). The “can’t”, which is italicized to add
stress, is not a conscious “can’t” but rather an unconscious “can’t”. The reason why
Norman is incapable of speaking out about his inward trauma derives from his
“defense”－the instinctive reaction to the reality. Moreover, it is highly possible that
what he is defending is his reputation of bravery. According to Lacanian theory, the
motivation of self-defense derives from our desire, namely our unconsciousness. In
contrast with the consciousness, which the signifiers derive from the language of the
reality, the signifiers of the unconsciousness come from not only the language of the
reality but also the idea of ‘I’ (the imaginary I)－fantasy. Norman is not really
incapable of speaking out about repressor in his psyche, but he unconsciously does
not want to do it. The “can’t” is developed by the voice of the ‘I’ in the imaginary
order. ‘I’ also delivers his/her discourse to the object, and that would dominate the
information from the reality. Generally, the aim of that ‘I’ is to deliver his/her
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discourse to dominate the significance from reality in order to defend himself/herself.
Fantasy is the condition which people long for. Therefore, the reality, which people
actually experience, could be totally opposite from their fantasy. Fantasy, which
Lacan formalizes in the matheme ($◇a), means the barred subject in relation to the
object. Simply put, fantasy means the thinking that exists between the object and the
banned Subject. Norman, the object, makes up conversations with the townspeople,
the subject, imagining the reactions he would receive and creating its significance.
Even in the content of the dialogues, we can also see the idea of defense－“‘Well,
anyway’,… ‘there’s still the seven medals’” (154). In order to protect his reputation
of bravery, he unconsciously chooses to keep silent as a means of self-defense.
In Norman’s letter, he also mentions: “It’s almost like I got killed over in
Nam…” (156). After looking in vain for hints of the war all over the town, he then
creates a war in his imagination which is dominated by his own ‘I’. After the Vietnam
War, the power of ‘I’ in Norman’s psych grows bigger and bigger. We can observe
that the power of ‘I’ is even stronger than that of the significance of reality because,
throughout the story, Norman keeps his secret in mind, has no ability to talk about the
war to anybody, and lives in his own imagination. He prefers to follow his own
fantasy rather than to face the outer reality. Thus the reality in his psyche is immobile
after the war. According to Freud’s theory, “death drive …involves interpretations of
unconscious ‘phantasy’…” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 15). However, living in
the fantasy does not mean that his war trauma has disappeared or that he could then
freely pursue his will to enjoy his life. The traumatic experience will re-present itself
again and again in his psyche. His imagination of talking to his father and the energy
he expends looking for matters relating to war may serve as proof of this. The war is
over, but it keeps on progressing in Norman’s psyche because his psyche is stagnant
in the war. He follows his own pleasure and lets the power of ‘I’ in his psyche grow
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bigger than the reality. This finally results in the inception of a death drive, which is
why he says that ‘I got killed over in Nam’.
The conflict between the fantasy and the reality in Norman’s psyche is a pulland- push relationship between pleasure and reality. Such a psychological situation
can be called the relationship between the life drive and the death drive－the reality
principle leads to the life drive, and the pleasure principle leads to the death drive.
Norman hangs himself three years after the war. This might be because Norman
prefers to act by his pleasure principle, which gives rise to his death drive. In the
meantime, however, the external world (the reality) possesses the function of
assisting the human subject to achieve homeostasis by its two characteristics: to bare
and to face. Reality is a condition in the human community which is constituted by
man-made rules or laws. In other words, when we come in contact with reality, we
face a set of rules challenging our id (our desire and joy). Therefore, we sometimes
have no choice but to follow the rules dictated by reality (the superego), and we thus
perform our duty which disobeys our desire, baring the displeasure, ceasing our inner
fancy, and facing the outer reality.
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Death Drive
22
Life Drive
Ego
Id
Superego
Pleasure Principle
Reality Principle
Figure 2 The relationship between the life drive and the death drive
In Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he points out that individuals
instinctively and repeatedly recount their traumatic experiences. According to his
research about this repetition, in these cases life instincts are juxtaposed with death
instincts. When human beings are consumed by a tendency toward acting based on
their id (the pleasure principle), their psyche will then tend toward the death drive; by
contrary, when they live with the superego (the reality principle), that means they are
getting closer to the life drive. The pleasure principle, which conflicts with the
external world, leads the subject to walk over to the side of death. The pleasure
principle refers to people who keep away from reality and follow their own will, as
there is something that they do not want to face or a desire to escape the significance
(language of the community) of reality and to defend themselves. However, human
beings are social animals. Isolating oneself from the community will result in
melancholy, despair, psychological stagnancy, and even death. Thus, according to
Freud’s theory, Norman’s war trauma may get progressively worse if he continues to
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separate himself from reality.
In fact, the best condition of a person’s psychological condition lies in keeping
a balance between the reality principle and the pleasure principle. Such an ideal
condition is operated by a mediator, known as the “ego”. The ego can be our
consciousness and our knowledge which can mediate the death drive and the life
drive in our psych. In the belief system of Buddhism, Buddha stated that refining
oneself does not require living in suffering and hardship, but rather exists as a
condition of half suffering and half joy. When a person who does everything
maintains a moderate condition between the positive and the passive or between the
reality and the imagination, the manner of discourse and behavior that he/she
expresses will makes other people feel pleasant. People will never define such a
person as overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. According to the Buddha’s words,
we should keep our psyche in a condition of half suffering and half joy. Norman’s
situation seems to go forward in the opposite direction, attempting to defend his
glorious reputation as a hero, allowing his fantasy to occupy the chief position in his
psyche, indulging himself in his fantasy, walking toward the path of chasing the
pleasure principle and being swallowed by the death drive step-by-step. Therefore,
we may infer that Norman’s self-defense was the original cause of his decision to
helplessly commit suicide.
While he is making his eleventh round, the author says of Norman that, “There
was nothing to say. He could not talk about it and never would” (O’Brien 153). In this
round, Norman is extremely frustrated and disappointed. Meanwhile, there is a new
manner of thinking appearing in Norman’s mind. At the beginning of this round, he
still tries to protect his heroic honor. He says that “[he wishes] he could’ve explained
some of [that]”. He intends to give words to defend himself for being unable to save
Kiowa. But then he murmurs, “I let the guy go”. He starts to consider that he is
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24
responsible for Kiowa’s death. At this time, he cares not only about the honor but also
the responsibility. In fact, this new comprehension is not a good thing for him,
because he now has one more unspeakable secret to bear. For him, it is like the
condition of snow plus ice－one disaster coming after another. Later, in the twelfth
circuit, “the sky went crazy with color” (154). The sky here is just a comparison to his
psychical condition. Norman’s emotional state exceedingly tends towards madness,
which ultimately forces him to get out of the safe Chevy. Norman “walked down to
the beach, and waded into the lake without undressing.” This scene is reminiscent of
the ceremony of receiving baptism. Norman seems to want to use the lake water to
wash away his transgressions, letting it take all of his war memories away so that he
can be reborn and return to a new life, without his war memories. Yet, unfortunately,
he will never have the opportunity to be reborn if he does not speak out about his war
trauma. Therefore, he silently drives around the lake once more, which means that he
chooses to follow his fantasy again. This will bring him much closer to the death
drive.
At the end of “Speaking of Courage”, the author ends the chapter with the line:
“For a small town, he decided, it was a pretty good show”. After driving around the
lake twelve times, Norman seems to be incapable of handling his war traumas any
more. He gets out of the car, stands in the lake, folds his arms, and watches the
fireworks in the sky. The words “pretty good” are actually a deliberately flat response;
it is the kind of thing we say when we want to compliment others but cannot think of
anything suitable or genuinely complimentary to say. When we hear one who says it,
it means that he/she has no enthusiasm for the claim being made. In addition,
fireworks are often used at festivals as a means for a country to show off its
prosperity or a city to exhibit its traditional features. The gesture of folding his arms
symbolizes that Norman deeply concentrates himself and the issue he is thinking
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25
about. After pondering for a long while, he judges that the fireworks in his hometown
are “pretty good”. Norman’s words suggest to us that he wants to compliment them
and find himself in accord with them, but cannot muster the enthusiasm for a more
meaningful compliment. These words correspond with his negative attitude earlier
towards the landscape when he drove around the lake in the later stage. The author’s
use of this line to end this chapter implies to the readers that Norman is too indifferent
to the townspeople.
All in all, the likelihood of Norman committing suicide is quite high due to two
of his personal characteristics: his characteristic quietness, and his high standard
regarding “courage”, which we could also call his heroic characteristics. Silence is
fatal to a traumatic person. Norman cannot speak out about his painful sufferings, and
without the language to connect imagination and reality, he cuts the opportunity to
obtain “love and care” from the townspeople. As a result, he can only bear the
traumatic burden alone and indulge himself in the “traumatic situation”. What’s worse,
his outstanding achievement in the army shapes him into the typical hero character
for his hometown.
If Norman Bowker demonstrates the type of person who cannot speak out about
traumas, then Rat Kiley may be the representative person who illustrates how
important it is to speak out. Rat’s condition is much luckier than Norman’s. Rat
expresses his trauma via written language and abreacting behaviors. He writes a letter
to show his respect and condolences to his best friend, who died in the war field. He
kills the baby buffalo bit by bit to discharge his resentment. His words are impolite
and his acts are rude and cruel, yet Rat speaks out about his traumatic feelings and
thus frees his mood.
In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the author narrates two incidents. Rat sends
a letter to Curt Lemon’s (his best friend) sister to extol her brother’s virtues after he
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dies. Surprisingly, two months later, the letter is just like a stone which is thrown into
a deep river－it disappears without tidings at all necessary. Lemon’s sister never
wrote back. Rat is so frustrated that he blames her as a “dumb cooze”. For Rat,
blaming Curt’s sister serves to discharge his mood. After rebuking, “he spits and
stares” (69). The gesture of “spiting” involves not only contempt and hatred but also
the discharge of something unwanted. When people spit, it usually complaining or
loudly scolding someone. People spit to eject their anger and dissatisfaction. Rat’s
rude reaction to Curt’s sister is understandable, for most of the soldiers are only about
seventeen to eighteen years old, and this is a common way for boy of this age to
discharge their moods. The second incident relates to a baby buffalo. After Curt died,
Rat suffered from the pain of losing his best friend and put up with Curt’s sister’s
indifference and impoliteness at the same time. This double distress makes him mad,
and he crudely shoots a baby buffalo to death, little by little before his friends, an act
of discharging his anger which makes people scared of him.
These two incidents convincingly show that Rat knows how to discharge his
trauma. He discharges his emotions by a letter (writing), blame (speech), and killing
(action). In addition to spoken language, physical languages such as gestures and
behaviors have the power to discharge one’s psychical pressure. For people suffering
from trauma, speaking out or acting out their traumatic experiences can be seen as a
means of self-treatment that enables them to release their traumatic pressure.
Language is a connector linking the id, the ego and the superego. Helpless people can
obtain love and care by communicating with the people in the society and thus
gradually keep away from the unpleasant emotions. Otherwise, the traumatic
accumulation may result in a “situation of danger,” which may cause them to hurt
themselves or may make people around them get hurt. The reason why Rat did such
cruel behavior is because the baby buffalo had refused his kindness when he tried to
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feed it supper. The baby buffalo’s refusal to accept his supper is comparable to Curt’s
sister refusing to reject to his letter. He insults Curt’s sister but he adopts a more
extreme manner toward the baby buffalo－killing it bit by bit. Perhaps shooting the
baby buffalo to death is Rat’s means of discharging his anger towards Curt’s sister.
Throughout the baby buffalo killing, the platoon just stands there, watching, and
murmuring to each other. The platoon’s reaction seems to be similar to that of
Norman’s townspeople and parents. They do not say anything to Rat. The same
situation occurs when Rat insulted Curt’s sister; the platoon also keeps silent. “Rat
Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but then cradled his rifle and went off by
himself” (79). After killing the baby buffalo, which is the most extreme and cruel way
to discharge his negative sentiments, Rat seems unable to let the trauma go and find
peace in his psyche. Rat cries, which is the most natural way for human beings to
discharge sad moods. Like a child who cries for help, Rat reverts to the most
primitive condition to discharge his feelings. How is it that he can powerfully
discharge his moods and anxiety, yet remains unable to release his trauma? Although
Rat successfully discharges his trauma, he still cannot get away from his “traumatic
situation”. Getting away from the “traumatic situation” requires not only discharge
but also feedback from the community, which may give him “love and care”. After
Rat discharges his moods, people around him just watch silently or murmur to each
other. Nothing is said to him. Therefore, we see that Rat scolds and spits, but then
stares at a loss; he kills but then cries helplessly.
The first object to whom he discharged is a female, so it was normal to receive
no feedback. Relating war stories to females requires some skills and delicacy;
otherwise, it is better not to tell. As the author states, “…as a rule she hates war
stories; she can’t understand why people want to wallow in the blood and gore” (84).
Females and males have totally different responses to certain issues. It is therefore
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understandable that when you tell war stories to females, by and large, most of them
do not really listen to them and may be eager to change the subject. Rat claims that he
extols Curt’s virtues; nevertheless, virtues in war may repulse females. The other
reason that he received no feedback was due to the way he expressed himself. Rat
knows how to discharge his anxiety, yet the approaches which he uses are
unacceptable for the general public. His extreme manner of expression does not easily
evoke people’s love and sympathy. These acts are all performed in front of his friends,
yet they do not evoke feelings of pity in his friends; he is doomed to be unable to win
their love and care.
Neither Norman nor Rat is good at words. Norman cannot speak out about his
psychological burden. Similarly, Rat is not good at discourses. Most of the words he
says are short phrases of scolding and blame. In contrast to Norman, Rat is a simple
person who says what he wants to say and does what he wants to do. Such a
straightforward personality enables him to reduce his anxiety. Simply put, the
innocent people have better talents to discharge their trauma. In this aspect, Rat is
more fortunate than Norman.
Tim O’Brien may be the luckiest person of the three. He contacts his friends
after the war and then writes down their war stories into a novel. After the novel is
published, he, the author, has further chances to share his feelings and thinking about
the war with his readers. Writing a novel and talking to his readers let him release his
traumatic burden; at the same time, this helps him achieve the aim of self-treatment.
All of these efforts at communication can be seen as a form of therapy for his war
trauma. Many years after the war, he even returns to the war field with his daughter to
recollect his memories in Vietnam. We can see that Tim O’Brien (the actual writer,
#1) desires and attempts to apply many possible ways to re-experience the war in his
memories. The approaches he uses are effective at reducing his trauma. Getting close
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to the public and speaking out about one’s war experiences or recalling one’s
traumatic memories and reconsidering the significance of experiences make it
possible to successfully reduce the suffering from a “traumatic situation”.
Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) seems to walk out of the trauma, yet this is
not actually the case. “I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet when
I received Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led
me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or
worse” (158). Writing novels and getting in touch with friends are two useful ways to
discharge traumas. Writing is especially useful, as it enables the author to recall his
war memories and thus create new thinking and inspiration about the incidents that
happened in the war. The function of discharge is to prevent one’s traumatic situation
from getting worse. Although the narrator successfully overcame the “traumatic
situation,” this does not necessarily mean that his war trauma is cured. In fact, the
function of discharge is quite limited, as it can only maintain the traumatic condition
in the original state and cannot actually cure the trauma. Discharge helps the human
subject to balance inner mental repression and the external reality so as to prevent the
death drive from being turned on. However, traumas serve as an endless nightmare,
because they will appear constantly in one’s psyche. When the traumatic pain rises,
discharge serves as a kind of medicine that can curb the suffering. It helps people
release their pain temporarily and stop their illness from becoming worse. However,
as the effects of medicine fade with time, the traumatic pain will emerge again and
again, slowly but surely.
Why is it that novel writing cannot achieve the function of curing Tim
O’Brien’s (the actual writer, #1) war trauma? Generally speaking, the content in the
novel is delivered by the narrator, who depends on his memory to write down the
words that he wants others to know. This suggests to us there are some things that he
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may not want readers to know, for some special or personal reasons. Take the “Tim
O’Brien” character, for example. Tim O’Brien sometimes shows up as a character in
the novel, sometimes he plays the role of the narrator, and other times he seems to
turn out to be the author. We see three “Tim O’Briens”, and that is perhaps the skill
with which the author attempts to conceal something from his readers. However,
people’s traumas are generally hidden in their unconsciousness. The secrets they try
to conceal may be traumatic points which bother them occasionally but which they
are generally unaware of. This is why it is difficult for readers to connect closely with
the author’s trauma. Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) uses the characters as tools to
relate the war experiences of himself and his comrades and express some certain
meaning. For instance, Elroy, whom Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) says he made
up, seems to play the role of God or Father, and he is used by Tim O’Brien (the actual
writer, #1) to describe the process by which Tim O’Brien (the narrator, #2) joins the
Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) employs the characters to express
his thinking about the war, his viewpoint towards the incidents in the war, and his
feelings about soldiers’ deaths.
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Character1
31
Character2
scene of novel
Reader
scene of novel in readers’ mind
Author
scene of novel in the author’s mind
Figure 3 The graph of trauma discharge－by novel writing
In the figure above, we see that the narrator narrates the story, which depends
on his consciousness, through the characters in the novel. After reading the book,
readers use the same model to set free their own inner emotions, such as sadness,
stress, and dissatisfaction, or offer their opinions according to the content of the novel.
Consequently, in the most outward rectangle of the figure, the feedback which the
narrator obtains is the product (the scene), and this is a combination of the scene of
the novel and the scene of the novel in the readers’ minds (condition) being filled with
various kinds of emotions or viewpoints which do not relate to the author’s traumatic
pain, because the characters in the novel are made up by the author.
Tim O’Brien’s (the actual writer, #1) war trauma still bothers him in his
unconscious. The trauma in the consciousness can be resolved by discharge; however,
the trauma in the unconscious is not so easily cured. It will exist in the human
subjects’ psyche forever if it is not removed, and it may occasionally appear in our
memories and our dreams. Tim O’Brien states that “the point doesn’t hit you until
twenty years later, in your sleep, and you…start telling the story…, except when you
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get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again.” “This one wakes me up” (82). Even
after twenty years have passed, Tim’s traumatic memories still haunt him. The scene
of the battlefield keeps emerging in his dreams, and he reviews these war fragments
again and again. There is no beginning, no ending, and no point. He himself has no
ideas about the reasons why these traumatic war experiences repetitively come into
his mind. Such “traumatic repetition” can be illustrated by the Freudian “Repetition
Compulsion,” a compulsion in which an individual repetitively exposes
himself/herself to a distressing situation. It can be said that this is the destiny of
human beings, because we are born this way. Such a pained repetition is an instinct
towards the external world which simultaneously makes a person come closer to
reality and get away from the pleasure principle. “The instinct [the Traumatic
Compulsion] is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will
to power” (Beyond, 481). “Repetition Compulsion” can be seen as water which can
both support the boat and also cover the boat. In other words, it can be a great chance
for human beings to refine themselves and become more powerful, but at the same
time it can also become a long-term psychological burden, leading the subject to
constantly experience the psychological suffering, resulting in inactivity, fear, and
torment. The war trauma is so huge that many people are incapable of overcoming it.
In reality, many warriors overcome their “traumatic situation,” but only some of them
can successfully overcome their traumas, avoid entering into the “traumatic
repetitions,” and return to their normal lives.
Norman’s and Tim O’Brien’s war traumas are historical traumas. Historical
traumas are traumas which come from wars, massacres, and holocausts. It is scarcely
possible to re-experience these, and the trauma in the unconsciousness cannot be
removed with the passage of time. This differs from the daily traumas which human
beings may encounter in their daily lives, such as the sense of frustration, being hurt
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by lovers, losing relatives, and so on. These traumas can be cured if the same
situation which brings about the trauma occurs again. Those who are traumatized may
deal with the same situation in different ways as they grow older. After overcoming
the traumatic feeling, their traumas will disappear. It does not mean that they have no
way to get out of their trauma. What they need is a certain person (the carrier) to
provide certain help (transference).
According to Lacan’s theory, Transference is a psychoanalytic therapy used to
treat “traumatic repetition”. If we compare the “repetition” to an opening of the
unconsciousness, the “transference” will be the closure of it－to close the traumatic
repetition forever. Discharge does help to release a person’s conscious trauma, namely
within the field of knowledge, whereas the traumatic repressor in the unconsciousness
needs transference to cure it. If the traumas in the unconsciousness cannot be closed,
they may show up in invisible ways. This kind of unconscious repressor may make
people afraid of doing some things related to the traumatic experiences, and it may
even cause them to escape from some certain situations. Both Norman and Tim
O’Brien do not get rid of their traumas, because they still exist in their
unconsciousness. Their traumatic experiences remain in their unconsciousness, but
they themselves are not aware of that. Norman is afraid of talking about Kiowa’s
death, and Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) is haunted by his dreams. They still
struggle with their war trauma. Tim O’Brien, the author, hides the traumatic point in
his unconsciousness very well. We can hardly find any clues in the novel suggesting
why he still wanders in the traumatic river. But that is understandable. The traumatic
point is hidden in human beings’ unconsciousness, so Tim O’Brien, who writes the
novel depending on his consciousness, would not reveal his traumatic point in the
novel. However, in his novel he offers clues for us to discover Norman’s traumatic
point in his unconsciousness; that is the “complex of a hero” or “the sense of guilt for
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letting Kiowa go”. If the right person could show up while Norman aimlessly drives
around the lake, perhaps he/she might be the carrier who would promote him to speak
out about the traumatic point, thereby giving rise to a strategy to close his war trauma.
The word “transference” translates the German word “übertragen”: “über”
means “cross”, and “Tragen” means “to carry”. Therefore, there must be a carrier to
help the traumatic person to cross over the traumatic repetition (repetition compulsion)
and overcome it. In the process of Transference 4, the analyst is the carrier. If there are
no analysts to be carriers and to lead analysands to cross the sad river, the trauma will
continually and repetitively emerge. The ideal candidate assists Norman to cross the
traumatic river should be his father. Norman’s father is the one whom Norman is
extremely eager to talk with, and the imaginary dialogues with his father in this novel
are the evidences.
“You really want to hear this?”
“Hey, I’m your father.”
Norman Bowker smiled. He looked out across the lake and
imaged the feel of his tongue against the truth. “Well, this one
time, this one night out by the river … I wasn’t very brave.”…
The stink, that’s what got to me. I couldn’t take that goddamn
awful smell.”
“If you don’t want to say any more－”
“I do want to.”
“All right then. Slow and sweet, take your time.” (O’Brien
142-3 )
4
Transference is the psychological treatment assisting the analysands to overcome their traumatic
point and close their traumas in their unconsciousness. At first, the analyst develops friendly and close
relationships with the analysand in order to reach the aim of recalling the analysand’s traumatic
memories. After the analysand states his/her traumatic story, the analyst would try to find out the
“traumatic point,” which might be the main reason that results in the analysand wandering in the sad
river.
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If Norman’s father could play the role of the carrier and demand that Norman speak
out about his traumatic memory, he could find out that Norman’s traumatic point is
his “complex of a hero” and help him close the “traumatic repetition”. However,
Norman’s father never takes the initiative to talk to him and care for him in this way.
In fact, trauma is not necessarily a negative thing to a human subject. If the human
subject can overcome the repetition compulsion, then he/she will be closer to the
Nirvana principle－the tendency to achieve a conflict-free state of no pain and no
worry in the psyche. However, it is somewhat unclear whether the war trauma can
also be included in this situation or not because it is too painful to undertake after all.
On the whole, after the new subject is constructed, the symptom of traumatic
repetition will then be closed, and the so-called repetition compulsion will disappear,
thereby curing the trauma in the person’s psyche.
In this novel, Norman is the most unfortunate person, as he eventually commits
suicide to end his war trauma. His original fault lies in the fact that he
over-emphasizes his own definition of “true courage”, which results in his inability to
put his reputation aside and face the reality that Ted died partly due to his inability to
face the stench of the field. Even though he is eager to tell his war story to others, his
efforts are in vain due to his “complex of a hero”. He is unable to express his
traumatic story, instead indulging in his own imagination and following the pleasure
principle. All of that gives rise to his death drive, which leads him to walk toward
death. At the same time, however, Rat, another traumatized person, demonstrates a
different side. He knows how to discharge, and he discharges his repressor not only
through talking and saying, but also through his writing and even extreme behavior.
Even though there is no feedback, he still bravely and directly deals with his
traumatic feelings. Through these various kinds of languages, Rat gets into the
symbolic order and builds the “ego”, which helps him balance the death drive and the
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life drive. The fortunate author, Tim O’Brien, discharges his war trauma by writing a
war novel. He discharges his emotions and distress through the characters in the novel
and obtains feedback from the readers. However, he still cannot overcome his war
trauma. Trauma thus persists in Tim’s unconsciousness after twenty years. As he
writes in his novel, “The point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your dream”.
What Norman and Tim O’Brien need is a carrier who can help them to cross the
traumatic river and cut out the repetition compulsion. Only by doing so can the war
trauma be expelled from their psyches forever.
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Chapter Three
Discourses of Inaudible Words
Norman Bowker cannot discharge his war trauma by speaking it out and then
hinder him from getting the ego’s voices which may offer him massage in the reality
and help him get out of the traumatic situation. He might have chance to get toward to
the superego and get away from the dead drive, after receiving the voices. However,
in this chapter, we will see the Tim O’Briens sufferings from the inaudible
domination operating by the superego. The superego is constructed by the will of the
Other. It is taboos or customs which can also be labeled as the ethic. The community
possesses its own rules that the members of it are expected to follow. Some rules are
made by the country: positive laws. Some laws are shaped by the words from the
community－the superego. The superego in Freud’s work is an ideal-ego. To get
closer the superego may bring Norman to get close to the community. By contrast,
Lacan’s superego can be the ideal-ego but it also can be the law which has a
“senseless, blind character, of pure imperativeness and simple tyranny” (Seminar I,
102). To get closer to the superego, the Tim O’Briens will thus disobey their
conscience.
If the law of your country conflicts with your will, what will you do? Which
will you give up, your country or your own will? In the chapter “On the Rainy River”,
Tim O’Brien (the narrator, #2) describes the process of abandoning his anti-war
attitude and joining the Vietnam War. The “O’Brien” to whom we refer in “On the
Rainy River” could be the actual person or only the narrator. Maybe Tim O’Brien (the
actual writer, #1) intends to discharge his guilt for joining the Vietnam War, or maybe
it is only a story which is narrated by the narrator in this novel. In the beginning of
this chapter, O’Brien is the person who considers that “killing and dying [do] not fall
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within my special province” (O’Brien 41). However, things happened which were
beyond his imagination. After receiving his draft notice, O’Brien begins thinking
seriously about the significance and the value of wars. If sacrificing the minority can
save the majority, maybe, in some respects, “killing” makes sense and is necessary.
For instance, killing may be worthwhile if the purpose is “to stop Hitler or some
comparable evil” (44). But the Vietnam War was not comparable to the threat of
Hitler. However, O’Brien ultimately decides to defy the erroneous government policy,
and he flees to the Canadian border to prove his rejection of war. He not only
demonstrates his dissatisfaction with the policy of the government but also obeys the
inaudible voice of his mind－his conscience. The voices from his instincts tell him to
run and get away from the war. “Both my conscience and my instincts were telling
me …, just take off and run” (44). Instinct is the feeling or ability to know something
intuitively rather than by considering the facts. That is, it has no direct connection to
his conscience, which is based in morality. When he makes the decision to go to
Canada and defend his moral faith, he seems somewhat unsure that he has made the
correct choice. Choosing to be a draft-dodger requires courage because a draft-dodger
is often seen as “a coward or a traitor”, totally opposed to the heroic images of
bravery and loyalty that are endorsed by our families and the society and then
internalized in our minds: “All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral
emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth” (39). The war can serve as
that moral emergency. The phrase “All of us” shows that he considers the notion that
the heroes will be universally and appreciated. Therefore, O’Brien is telling us that, in
his mind, fleeing the war runs in contrast to the patriotic rules, so he hesitates to act
on the anti-war position that his conscience endorses.
In O’Brien’s words, “The only certainty that summer was moral confusion”
(40). Before O’Brien plans to leave for the Rainy River, he falls into a dilemma－to
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obey the will of the Other or to be in keeping with his own conscience. After
struggling and considering this for a long period, he chooses to run away from his
hometown. He does this not only due to his conscience but also sense of his value. He
“believes” that “he deserves better”: “I was too good for this war. Too smart, too
compassionate, too everything”, (41) and “I was no soldier”. He is a college graduate;
why does he have to care about the words and opinions of the townspeople? They are
farmers, pious churchgoers, and chatty housewives. He knows history better than they
do; why should he care about their judgments? They are ignorant of the facts.
Although O’Brien flees to Rainy River, he does not feel better for following his
conscience: “It was as if there were an audience to my life, the faces along the river,
and in my head I could hear people screaming with me” (59). O’Brien suffers from
“the faces,” which are the imaginary audiences in his psyche. These audiences’
screams do not exist in reality; rather, they are the voices labeled gaze-discourse 5.
Gaze-discourse is the autocratic power pressing each singular subject to follow the
common consciousness which is formed by the community. This kind of common
consciousness has nothing to do with morals or national laws. It can be seen as an
“ethic”－customs or taboos－which are completely accepted and believed by the
community. Every member of the community is just like the other, the little other,
who biologically and mechanically follows the Other, the big other (the significance
of the Community). If you disobey the laws of a country, then you may be put in jail.
But if you disobey the ethic, you will feel embarrassment or shame. O’Brien thinks
that his manner of fleeing to the border will be defined as a betrayal by the Other. So
the term “traitor”, begins to be formed in his imagination. Thus we understand why
O’Brien hears the cry of “‘Traitor!’ they yelled” (59) from the Rainy River shore.
5
The gaze-discourse is human beings’ imagination resulting from the significance of the Other, God,
the gods, the conscience and so on. In other words, the gaze-discourse is the discourse deriving from
human beings’ minds.
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O’Brien imagines that every word that he says and every move that he makes is
watched by the townspeople. In O’Brien’s mind, they become the imaginary monitors,
who keep constant watch on him. Under such a situation, he says, “I felt myself blush.
I can’t tolerate it” (59). O’Brien blushes because he does not follow the language
constructed by the Other; in other words, he blushes not for doing the wrong things
but for his embarrassment in being seen as wrong by the Other.
Perhaps embarrassment is not a big deal for some human beings. For O’Brien,
however, it is tough to cope with the inconsistent senses with the Other: “All those
eyes on me－the town, the whole universe－and I couldn’t risk the embarrassment”
(59). Perhaps that is the reason why O’Brien stays at the Rainy River for only six days.
Though he is away from his home town, his soul seems to stagnate in the same
condition as if he were still there. O’Brien struggles with the gaze-discourse derived
from the town, no matter where he is. “[T]he young O’Brien kid, how the damned
sissy had taken off to Canada” (45). Tim O’Brien (the narrator, #2) says that nobody
knows he has ever been to the border－the Tip-Top Lodge: “This is one story I’ve
never told before. Not to anyone” (39). In other words, none of the people in his
hometown know that he went to the Rainy River. That means that none of his
townspeople were really there. “I feared ridicule and censure. My hometown was a
conservative little spot on the prairie, …” (45), which hints to us that the ethic of this
region involves always following the behavior of everyone else. He feels alone in his
dissent as he feels alone at the lake. Although the townspeople do not use words to
blame him, the censure which they would deliver actually works in O’Brien’s mind
because of the gaze-discourse. O’Brien himself does not understand that his sense of
embarrassment is not given by others but by himself; that is the gaze-discourse in his
psyche. In Lacanian theory, “We will then realize that the function of …the gaze is
both that which governs the gaze most secretly and that which always escapes from
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the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagination of itself as
consciousness” (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 74). Lacan
proposes that “the gaze,” just like human beings’ imagination, derives from the gaze
of the Other in reality. Tim O’Brien sees that by disobeying the Other’s will he risks
embarrassment in reality, and that image turns out to be a permanent part of his mind.
When he is at the Rainy River, even though his community is invisible, they are
always “the whole universe”.
Fleeing to Canada and deciding to be a draft-dodger may be the most correct
thing that he does in the novel. O’Brien takes “great courage” in leaving for the Rainy
River and then getting along with the old man and receiving his silent discourse. “The
man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life…. Blurt it out－the man
saved me. He offered exactly what I needed, without any words at all…. He was there
at the critical time－a silent, watchful presence” (O’Brien 48). The old man’s manner
is just like that of a Father, whom we always think of when we hesitate or suffer
hardship and who usually keeps silent but sometimes implies something. He
represents protection, justice and the eternal truth. In O’Brien’s view, the old man is
his silent hero. He expresses this story as a gesture of “gratitude twenty years
overdue” (48). Twenty years after experiencing the war, O’Brien still thinks that the
old man is a hero to whom he wants to express his thankfulness. That means that the
old man is a real and eternal hero who can be looked up to and followed. That is, he
represents the so-called “truth”－that thing that will never change as time goes by.
Furthermore, the old man can embody O’Brien’s conscience, which is invisible and
silent but always present in his mind, showing up as “a silent, watchful presence”. He
is the Father who is always present in our psyche and reminds us of human nature
whenever we forget it.
O’Brien does not stay at the Tip-Top Lodge too long. Perhaps he wants to stay,
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but he ultimately chooses to leave. The gaze-discourse from the Other and his own
conscience cause great emotional turmoil in his mind: “The emotions went from
outrage to terror to bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage”
(45-6). O’Brien undergoes “moral confusion”, which is extremely bitter and which
can destroy one’s conscience. The object which O’Brien fights against is “the
superego”－the will of the Other. “[T]he superego is an imperative” and is “a
senseless, destructive, purely oppressive, almost always anti-legal morality” (Seminar
Ⅰ, 102). Lacan defines the superego as an authoritative but negative power to the
human community. The superego is imperative, for it is dictated by the will of the
majority in the community. It is a condition which human beings cannot deny. The
ego, the consciousness, in each human being’s mind serves as the referee between the
id and the superego. We experience the external world and then cannot but adapt our
id to suit the superego. This process is both a biological and psychological reaction.
O’Brien uses five steps to describe the progression “…from outrage to terror to
bewilderment to guilt to sorrow and then back again to outrage” (O’Brien 45-6).
“Outrage” is O’Brien’s first reaction to the superego. He rightly shouts out loud to
fight against the imperative and senseless superego. But then his outrage fades away,
replaced by “terror”. He is afraid of being the only one who does not obey the
superego which all of his townspeople follow. Then he feels confused and falls into a
dilemma. He has no idea what he should do. O’Brien express that the superego makes
us first feel fear and confusion, which are produced by his rejection to the superego.
Yet his emotions then change into “guilt” and “sorrow” because he finally realizes
that he is incapable of fighting with the powerful superego and has no choice but to
accept the viewpoint of the superego, even though it differs from his own. In the end,
he is doomed to be the slave in front of the master, the superego. The process is a
circular movement which will stop when the subject is completely willing to obey the
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will of the superego. In other words, the reaction of “outrage” stops when O’Brien
joins the war.
“I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all” (45). The
automatic acquiescence is the key word. The townspeople are just the people who
raise their hands to agree with an issue. But after the conference, they tell you that
they had been told to raise their hands to consent to it and that “they [don’t]
understand and [don’t] want to understand” the significance of it. This kind of
discourse can be called “Saying”. Saying is “the performative stating, proposing, or
expressive position of myself facing the Other. It is a verbal or non-verbal ethical
performance, whose essence cannot be caught in constative propositions” (Young
246). The performative discourse is not a statement of truth because it is not
verifiable. O’Brien ceases blindly “Saying” and starts to analyze its unreasonable
aspects. But the “Saying” in O’Brien’s hometown makes him embarrassed to
demonstrate his anti-war attitude. “Saying” is an ungrounded ethic, one that does not
offer any reasons and may not even have reasons. Even though it is unreasonable, it
keeps faltering in O’Brien. He once turns to Father, who represents the truth, for help
against the Saying. He falters in going along with it, but he cannot bring himself to
live by it. We feel that the saying is mentally powerful because it cripples the function
of the Father in O’Brien’s mind.
In the story of “On the Rainy River”, the word “law” appears twice. The first
time, O’Brien states that “[t]here should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if
you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids
on the line” (O’Brien 42). He doubts the “price of the law” and points out that the
government neglects the war’s price in the invisible part. For instance, “love” exists
among the people: “You have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover”.
He intends to claim that “love” is one of the precious things in the earth, and that in
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many cases it could be more significant than power. “Love” can bring happiness and
peace to human beings. So, love is a direct contrast thing to the “law”, which
emphasize that the value of power is more important than “love”. O’Brien not only
suspects the worthiness of the Vietnam War, but he also disagrees with the law which
the government bases it on.
“A law, I thought”. O’Brien mentions the word “law” for the second time.
O’Brien is bringing up the long history of “natural law” in Western thought. He uses
the italic letters to tell us that the law here is not the positive law of the state or the
code of the community but rather the natural law. Natural law is the law according to
human nature; it is included in social and personal interactions as binding rules of
moral behavior. Natural laws often contrast with man-made laws, as well as the less
codified customs or the taboos given by the Other. It precedes any government－it
rises “naturally” and “spontaneously” from human beings. Governments should
follow it, but they may not, and it can always be invoked against bad governments. In
other words, natural law cannot possibly be used to compel people to do things that
they are unwilling to do; this is especially true for those matters which fall under
morality－“killing” is one typical example. In a word, the spirit of man-made law
should be in accordance with natural law－the moral law.
Even though O’Brien comprehends that killing is immoral, he never thinks
about trying to convince the townspeople or fight against the government. O’Brien
clearly understands the significance of the distinctions between that which is moral
and that which is immoral. He says that “when a nation goes to war it must have
reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause” (40-1). In some cases,
if there is no choice but to go to war, then the war must accord with the demands of
justice. He knows that killing is not only a mistake, but also a mistake which cannot
be undone. He even dreams of a fairer and righter strategy for the government to face
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this thorny war issue. “The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you
choose your war” (44). Why couldn’t a draft board let people choose their wars? He
suggests that the government should let its people choose whether they will join the
war or not. All of the reasonable opinions which O’Brien offers are convincing. He is
intelligent and is too smart to be a “morally confused person”. Maybe O’Brien
himself really does not understand that the tough task for him is not to face the issue
of morality but rather to overcome the fear. The fear is the reason why O’Brien is
unable to defend his anti-war position and go up against the blind townspeople. “[H]e
feared losing the respect of my parents. [H]e feared the law. [H]e feared ridicule and
the censure” (45). He is afraid of violating the law of his country and accepting the
punishment, so he never tries to defy the government but instead attempts to escape it.
He also worries that disobeying the Other will disgrace his reputation. The thing
which O’Brien fears most is not being a criminal who breaks the country’s law, but
being a sinner who defies the will of the Other. He may have the courage to face the
law and accept the penalty, because after completing a term of imprisonment, he will
gain an opportunity to begin his new life. But the punishment (the gaze-language)
coming from the Other is inescapable. The penalty of national law tortures your body,
and the inaudible language anguishes your psyche.
The punishment which O’Brien will suffer begins with “embarrassment”. When
O’Brien is on the boat in the Rainy River, on one side of the boat is Minnesota and the
other side is Canada. Even though Canada is only twenty yards away, he just cannot
make up his mind to go there because he can still hear the sound of the townspeople:
“Traitor! They called! Turncoat! Pussy” (59).The sound of this patriotic ridicule
makes him blush. “It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it
was”. When somebody feels embarrassment that does not necessarily mean that
he/she is guilty. Embarrassment has nothing necessarily to do with right and wrong.
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Nevertheless, the feeling of embarrassment exists in our minds. Even if we leave the
crowd, that feeling does not disappear. The inaudible words keep on reminding us of
the things which embarrass us. They are the terrible power of the gaze. Thus, human
beings are social animals not only in the external world but also in the inner one.
Should he go to Canada, O’Brien can avoid legal punishment, but he cannot handle
the feeling of embarrassment, for he has no place to hide from it.
Most people in the community follow the words of the Other spontaneously. To
obey the will of the Other is a rule; they follow the Other silently and blindly, as “the
heteronomous people”: “The heteronomous people are the ones who speak as spoken
to and cannot think independently” (Lyotard 35). Perhaps it is the nature of
community. The townspeople in the Gobbler Café are “the heteronomous people”.
Conversely, O’Brien is an autonomous person who not only listens but also thinks and
talks independently and inquires about whether the voices coming from the majority
are correct or not. O’Brien says, “I’d be screaming at them, telling them how much I
detested their blindness, thoughtless,… their simpleminded patriotism” (O’Brien 45).
The townspeople he imagines are similar to the actors on the stage who speak
dialogue they are assigned. Therefore, the ethic developed by the “Saying” does not
always conform smoothly to the “natural law”. It is formed through the discourses
among people and thus changes with time, unlike the natural law which is the eternal
truth. Nevertheless, being an autonomous person, O’Brien cannot be the winner in the
“worldly play” due to his weakness. Perhaps, O’Brien should keep away from these
people and live in a place where he will not experience their pressure. Therefore,
fleeing to the Rainy River may be his best response.
After O’Brien succumbs, he becomes a member of the heteronomous people.
O’Brien’s “great courage” completely disappears. His fear then leads him to seek
excuses to protect himself, such as “I didn’t qualify for CO status－no religious
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grounds, no history as a pacifist” (44). Finally, he admits that the reason why he goes
to war is “[not for his] parents, not [his] brother and sister, not even the folks” (52).
The fear of facing and contradicting the powerful superego causes autonomous people
to begin to challenge their conscience. “I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to
be doing the right thing” (52). Even though O’Brien knows that “[God is] the true
audience” (60), implying that the faces along the river are not the “true audience,” he
still prefers to ignore his conscience. The paragraphs which describe the old man,
Elroy, strongly imply that he is the embodiment of the Father－that is, the conscience.
This is illustrated by the sentences “I can see the old guy staring at me” and “his gaze
[is] somehow slicing me open” (48). The old man is a silent person who never pries
into other people’s affairs; his sharp gaze makes people feel that there are no places to
hide, which is a quality of the Almighty Father. “The old man [shakes] his head” (48),
and intends to “[frame] a difficult question” (51), but he almighty “[understands] that
words were insufficient”. According to O’Brien’s words, the Father is able to read his
mind; he seems to comprehend that O’Brien struggles with the power of the superego,
so he shakes his head to express his powerlessness over O’Brien’s situation and thinks
that he has no need to say anything. He allows him free will. Father’s words need not
be said because they are all in O’Brien’s mind in the form of his conscience. The
Father or the gods did not speak, but if O’Brien reminded himself that they are the
true autonomy and audience in his life, he might have more power to fight against the
discourses of the superego. Although O’Brien cannot stick to his autonomous attitude,
he can be guided by others that are just as good, or even better, than the Other. That is,
O’Brien needs to pay attention to the internalized voice of God/Morality.
The name of the old man, Elroy, also suggests to us that he might be the
embodiment of God (the autonomy of the natural law). “El” is Hebrew for God, and
“roy” means “rex” in Latin, languages that evoke authonty in western tradition. The
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relationship between O’Brien and the old man symbolizes the relationship between
O’Brien and God. The old man knows everything about O’Brien. He tries to help
O’Brien, but what the old man receives is arguments and O’Brien’s silent objection.
For instance, when Tim O’Brien asks the old man to discuss how much he should pay
for the bill, the conversation is analogous to the negotiations between Tim O’Brien
and Father. “‘Call it even,’ [Elroy] said. ‘No.’ ‘Pick it up….’ The money lay on the
table for the rest of the evening” (54). The old man is silent most of the time, but
sometimes he displays information via his particular language－signifiers as Lyotard
uses the term: “The gods do not speak to me, even when I consult them. As they say,
they signify…” (Lyotard 43). The signifiers which the old man applies are similar to
metaphors or images. “[H]e had a way of compressing large thoughts into small,
cryptic packets of language” (Brien 49-50). For example, the old man appoints “an
owl circling the violet-lighted forest to the west” and says “[t]here is Jesus” (50).
Elroy tries to tell O’Brien that he understands the dilemma he is suffering now. He
compares O’Brien to a helpless and confused owl circling the forest but at the same
time points out that he is not alone because Jesus is together with him; all he has to do
is follow Jesus’ example and he will be like the owl flying to the west.
The old man weighs the value of being a deserter against the value of killing
people. He intends to tell O’Brien that working for him (God) at the Tip-Top Lodge
possesses higher value (significance) than being a “butcher” (in the war). They always
keep silent but they signify and give us the right to choose. “And yet by his presence,
his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the true audience. He was a witness
like Father, or like the gods, who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as
we make our choices or fail to make them” (60). However, after O’Brien follows the
will of the Other and gives up God’s or the gods’ will, Father leaves and allows him to
suffer his own choices: “I noticed that [Elroy’s] old black pickup truck was no longer
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parked in front of the house. I went inside and waited for a while, but I left a bone
certain that he wouldn’t be back”. Afterwards, O’Brien finally makes up his mind to
return to his hometown and enroll himself in the army. He knows that the old man
will never appear in front of him; that is, the Father’s words disappear in his life.
The story about O’Brien and the old man seems like a combat between the
Father and the superego. In other words, it represents the warfare between the
gaze-discourse of Father and that of the Other. The scene where O’Brien stays on the
boat with the old man illustrates that complicated straggle. The old man drives the
boat towards Canada but stops off shore. This behavior shows that the old man
strongly urges O’Brien to make up his mind to leave for Canada－to follow his
conscience and ignore the words from the Other. On the boat, the old man pretends to
busy himself to avoid looking at O’Brien. The old man forces him to make a decision,
but again he keeps silent and gives O’Brien free will to decide. This compels the
readers to infer and anticipate O’Brien’s reaction.
“Ain’t biting,” he said. Then after a time the man pulled in his
line and turned the boat back toward Minnesota. (60)
The old man says that the fish are not biting, but the subject of this sentence could just
as easily be O’Brien. It is possible that the old man understands that the inaudible
message from his conscience has already been evaded. In other words, the
gaze-discourse of his conscience is now replaced by that of the Other. The old man
then uses the excuse of “Ain’t biting” to return O’Brien to Minnesota. The superego
wins the tug-of-war. Maybe O’Brien is too young at twenty-one to handle such a
tricky problem. Perhaps God was giving him this dilemma to give him the courage to
make the right choice, but O’Brien is unable to comprehend that.
“The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the
pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and
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then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the
war” (61). Before the war, O’Brien could not resist the dominating power coming
from the Other, and he disobeyed the signifier offered by God. Yet the attitude of the
Other totally changes after the war. Before he went to the Vietnam, he was ashamed
for not joining the war. However, when he was in the field, he felt ashamed for killing
people because he viewed it as immoral. The war heroes are now viewed as ruthless
slaughterers by the general public－the same public that once would have condemned
him for not going to war. This shift in condemnation demonstrates that the language
from the Other can change its direction with the era; this illustrates that the voice of
the Other is a malleable moving truth, which is totally different from the eternal truth
of Father and the conscience. The shift in labeling－from “heroes” to “slaughterers”
－occurs repeatedly when we read historical critiques. After the ethic made by the
Other alters, O’Brien then can see the war closer to the way God does, and can rethink
the words of God more correctly, to say, “I was a coward. I went to the war”. O’Brien
says, “The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the
point?” (82). He rhetorically asks Christ the point, so, in some sense, he might desire
the approval of Christ. But, he also complains to God, and asks why he should
experience such pain, bear the guilt, and then have to realize that he is a coward in the
end.
The chapter “On the Rainy River” begins with the following lines: “For more
than twenty years I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to push it away,
and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts down on the paper, I’m hoping
to relieve at least some of the pressure on my dream” (39). Although O’Brien is an
autonomous person, he is too weak to demonstrate it. He relieves his pressure by
remembering the process of getting involved in the war and writing down the facts of
it. He uses a “comforting theory” to console himself and to decrease his stress of
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failing morality by arguing that “[c]ourage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite
quantities…” (40). Obviously, O’Brien wants to relieve the pressure of his shame in
disobeying morality as he says that “it offer[s] hope and grace to the repetitive
coward” (40). Nevertheless, the “comfort theory” can only give him temporary
consolation: “[I]t justified the past while amortizing the future” (40). Therefore, he
determines that defending his sense of morality cannot excuse his disobeying of
morality. The will of the Other is always changing. As time passes, the significance of
the incident will fill with various voices. In the end, the point of the incidents will
become vague. In the chapter “On the Rainy River”, Tim O’Brien (the actual writer,
#1) seems to use Tim O’Brien (the narrator, #2) to describe the process of the
narrator’s decision to join the Vietnam War. But the narrator’s manner of describing
these events leaves us with the feeling that he is telling the story of Tim O’Brien (the
character, #3). Although we cannot be completely sure which “Tim O’Brien” joins the
war, we know that Tim O’Brien which regrets his decision to ignore the words of
Father, to get closer to Father, and to keep faith with him.
After this novel was published, Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) told his
readers that he had not really gone to the Rainy River and had spent that period of
time working in a pig plant. In other words, there was not an old man named Elroy.
From the contents of this chapter, we can infer some reasons why the author made up
this story. We see confusion, struggle, argument, and compromise in it. He falls into a
disordered confusion regarding the definitions of heroes and slaughterers. Back in the
summer of 1968, O’Brien fell into a “moral emergency”, and he found an excuse to
comfort his sense of guilt－”we will behave like heroes of our youth…, without
thought of personal loss or discredit” (41). He then creates a made up story to express
how “[his] life seemed to be collapsing toward slaughter” (43). O’Brien intends to
show his readers that he was confused about the significance between “heroes and
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slaughterers”, and he tries to express that he was convinced by the will of his
townspeople, who played the role of the superego and made it too difficult for him to
obey conscience. He used this made-up story of meeting the old man, who was
written as the symbol of Father or his conscience, to represent his inner struggle and
pain. He emphasizes his decision to go to war in opposition to his own will. All of
these reasons for making up the story were also expressed succinctly at the beginning
of this chapter: “For more than twenty years I’ve had to live with it, feeling the shame,
trying to push it away, and so by this act of remembrance…” (39). According to these
lines, perhaps the author’s purpose of making up this story is to find some means to
release the pressure which exits in his psyche even after twenty years. The inaudible
words from his conscience will make the author feel guilt ever and forever because
those words are eternal truth.
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Chapter Four
Discourse of Aesthetics
In Chapter Two, we see that “Tim O’Brien" suffers from the gaze-discourse of
the Others, yet we ultimately have no idea who the real Tim O’Brien is. This narrative
complication may be the author’s way of establishing a relationship with the readers
and initiating them to experience the processes of war that he underwent. In this
chapter, we see the author’s aesthetic discourse. The author fathoms what people
(readers) would like to see in war stories, and he then panders to readers’ needs by
telling about the war in that way. This novel involves the author’s (a soldier’s)
memory which happened about twenty years ago. The author rememorizes his
experiences in war. He deals the novel not only by the narration from the view point
of a character who looks back the war after twenty years later and a soldier who was
experiencing the war on that time, but also by narrating the war in a manner that fits
readers’ sensory judgments on beauty, through his use of sentimental and agreeable
words. He humanizes and beautifies the war conditions and designs many beautiful
scenes to please readers. The beautiful words the author uses in his narration serve the
purpose of covering the ugliness in war.
Traumatic war stories are doomed to involve a tension between history and
story and between reality and fiction. As a result, there is inevitably a certain distance
between experience and representation. True war stories involve unspeakable
historical tragedies which are filled with violence, torture, bloody massacres, and so
on. In order to alleviate the heaviness of war, readers must be willing to open a book
such as this and read its lines. Many authors have created special traumatic narrative
skills to display their works. For example, in In Parenthesis, David Jones writes his
war story with poetry; Art Spiegelman presents Maus, which narrates the history of
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Jews who suffered from persecution at the hands of the Nazis, in the form of a comic
book; and Waltz with Bashir is Ari Folman’s animated creation, which portrays the
holocaust in the Lebanon War in 1982. Poetry is words with rhythm; it is much like
music which we enjoy with the eyes. Hence, it can be expected that there will be no
fears at all in this type of war work. Furthermore, comic books and animations are
excellent tools to give audiences a fancy and abstract representation of otherwise
serious and somber story. These two narrative tools are thus very suitable to be
applied to express things which are too cruel, too violent, or too distressing. And Tim
O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) adopts a narrative art which is similar to the effect as
“the fancy”.
I would like to call it as “Sentimental War Discourse”. The term “Sentimental
War Discourse” is related to the “Sentimentalism” which prevailed in the eighteenth
century. “Sentimentalism” tends to govern or deal things follow hearts instead of
minds. The Sentimental War Discourse in this novel is thus similar to the spirit of
Sentimentalism. For instance, the scene of Curt Lemon’s death is portrayed as a
“romantic story” by the author. He mentions a handsome kid, the sunlight, vines and
white blossoms. The author is apt to describe the scene depending on his feelings
rather than reason. We see that the author uses the word “true” many times to tell his
readers that the story he told is completely true. In “How to Tell a True War Story”,
the author starts the chapter with “[t]his is true” (67). After three pages, he repeatedly
emphasizes that “[i]t’s all exactly true” (70). In these three pages, the author conveys
the romanticized scene of the process of Curt Lemon’s death. The author may thinks
that telling a story about the process of a soldier who dies by romantic voices would
more suitably than telling it like a ugly aspect of war for readers. As we can see that
on page seventy-one, a new page begins with a symbol of ”－”, which is usually used
by the author when he switches from one issue to another. The author separates the
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former romantic story, and says that “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s
difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to
happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way” (71). With these
words, we are informed that the so-called true war story that the author told is
described from his “angle of vision”. That is why the author delivers his own
definition of “true” as a thing that “happened, to [him]” (70). The author tells the truth
from his subjective view.
“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and
therefore it’s safe to say that in a truth war story nothing is ever absolutely true” (82).
Those who have never personally experienced war will never understand such stories
because they cannot be comprehended with normal logic. Take these this incident for
examples: “Dave Jensen went over and shook the old man’s [the corpse] hand.
‘How-dee-doo,’ he said. One by one the others did it too…Rat Kiley bent over the
corpse. ‘Give me five,’ he said” (226). Under that kind of condition, many mad and
unbelievable reactions are possible. Sentimentalism intends to give readers nice
feeling in order to refine their virtues and good. We seldom read the kinds of the
inhumane incidents which are not suitable to the fine feelings. In contrast to these, we
found that the author mention about the beautiful matters throughout the novel.
War stories may be immoral but they may in some aspects be moral. Perhaps
the author prefers to let his readers see the moral aspects or he thinks readers would
like to see the moral part in war rather than the immoral one. He then applies the
Sentimental War Discourse in the story about six guys who hear the voices of “the
moral” (O’Brien 76). The soldiers tell Tim O’Brien (the character) that “[e]verything
talks. The trees talk polices, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam.
The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam－it truly talks” (74). Sentimentalists
believe that moral is intuitive. In normal situations, after hearing these words, Tim
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O’Brien (the character) should react to such fanciful words by considering that the
soldiers are exhausted and are under too great pressure. Instead of doubting the words
that his soldiers say, however, Tim O’Brien (the character) seems to think those
voices are real and says, “[i]n a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the
thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning
without unraveling the deeper meaning” (77). According to these lines, it is obvious
that the author does not want to talk about whether those soldiers had really heard the
voices or not, and he also does not give us an answer to this question. All he wants us
to know is that voices are named “the moral”. Therefore, the aim of such an
imaginative story might be to talk about “the moral”. The author turns this abnormal
story into a profound incident, albeit one that is difficult to comprehend. Perhaps the
author does not distort the truth of what actually happened, yet we can see that such a
manner of storytelling only leaves queries and questions in the minds of readers,
while weakening the immoral attribution in war and strengthening morality in it.
The author tries hard to relieve the heaviness of the novel, yet it seems that
some people avoid listening to or reading war stories altogether. “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…. What I should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new
stories to tell. I won’t say it but I’ll think it. I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and
I’ll think, you dumb cooze” (84-5). We may think that the author sees that women
always shield themselves from war stories. However, that’s not truth. He tells a
mysterious story about a woman character named Mary Ann. The chapter
“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” begins with “Vietnam was full of strange stories,
some improbable, some well beyond that, …” (89). Tim O’Brien (the narrator) uses
the words “strange”, “improbable”, and “beyond improbable” to describe how
surprised he is to hear the story. In some respects, the thing that he really wants to say
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is that the character, Mary Ann, is odd. Mary Ann is an outsider who is brought to
Vietnam but disappears in the mountains later on. Neither Tim O’Brien, the narrator,
nor Rat Kiley, the storyteller, nor Mark Fossie, her boyfriend, can figure out her
reasons for leaving.
Mary Ann is a seventeen-year-old American girl, and her story is a way of
imagining a pure and innocent opposite to the war even though it falls apart. She
knew nothing about the war, “but Mary Ann would just smile and stick out her tongue.
‘I’m here,’ she said, ‘I might as well learn something’” (96). In the beginning, she
tries to adapt to life in the war field. She chats with Vietnamese people and learns to
cook rice. She even goes out on an “[a]mbush. All night long” (102). She learns to
merge herself into the war. However, even though she tries hard to learn, the result is
that she finds she does not like war things and is tired of it. “[She] handed [Fossie] the
weapon. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said”. Mary Ann seems to give up living in the war. She
does not like being limited in war, preferring instead for her life to encompass “the
mountains, the mean little village, the trail and trees and rivers and deep misted-over
valleys” (111). Mary Ann is eager to go back into nature, which may refer to the
landscape. “Sometimes I want to eat this place, Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole
country－the dirt, the death…” The Vietnam War equals “dirt and death” to her. She
seems to hate it but she doesn’t reject it and wants to eat it to make it over. Mary
Ann’s story may represent the relationship between “a woman and a war”; that is, the
relationship between “purity, goodness and innocence” and “the dirt and the death”.
Or, to think of it another way, Mary Ann desires the world of Not-War; she turns on
thinking this way but then exposing its falsity. Women represent the outsider of the
war. Mary Ann’s story may also be the soldiers’ imagination of the separateness of
women but then it is canceled out in their own imaginations. Women and the US are
imagined as purely separate from the war, and then the imagination is not allowed to
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stand.
The author arranges three love stories which are interspersed in the novel. He
puts “Love” in the beginning, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” in the middle, and
the “The Lives of the Dead” at the end. The contents of the three love stories are
different. For instance, Jimmy and Martha are described as two people who are in
different worlds. Jimmy is in the battlefield, but Marsha is an outsider of war and a
young girl who loves peace and literature. Mark Fossie and Mary Ann Bell are sweet
couple who have similar ambitions. Yet all of them suffer the same destiny; for these
three couples are all separate from each other. We can observe that the three males
have common characteristics; for example, when they feel frustrated with the
surroundings they encounter, the images of their girlfriends naturally emerge in their
minds. This happened when Jimmy Cross “examined the darkness. Trouble, he
thought－a cave-in maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking
about Martha” (11). And it also happened to the character O’Brien, when he was on
his fourth day in the war. “All day long I’d been picturing Linda’s face, the way she
smiled” (228). The two instances above illustrate how Tim O’Brien and Jimmy Cross
think of their girlfriends when they encounter trouble or indulge in immoral
conditions. We feel that Marsha and Linda represent the normal world, or the world
with love which they hope is antithetical to the war.
Besides “love”, the author also tells us that women are forever outsiders to war;
it is impossible for them to understand the men who are in the battle, no matter if they
are on the battlefield or out of it. Mary Ann’s story in the beginning intends to blow
up the opposition, but it fails eventually. Mary Ann flies to Vietnam to get together
with Mark Fossie due to her love for him. However, she later leaves the army and her
sweetheart for the calling of the land which means nature. Marsha, another woman in
this novel, seems to play a similar role. She cares for and loves Jimmy Cross, but she
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seems to have no ideas about the war and thus cannot offer the fit care and comfort to
him. “She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war, except to say,
Jimmy, take care of yourself” (2). After the chopper takes Lavender away, Jimmy
Cross sits at the bottom of his foxhole. The narrator says, “In part, he was grieving for
Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to
another world, which was not quite real, and because …she was a poet and a virgin
and involved,…” (17). Women are compared to “love” by the author, yet this “love”
belongs not to war－women are outsiders even though they are willing to make
themselves become the ones in war.
In “Field Trip,” we see the dialogue between Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1)
with his daughter, Kathleen. By their words in this chapter, we read Tim O’Brien
keeps collects his memory in the field twenty years ago, reviewing the war, especially
the process of Kiowa’s dead, and trying to figure out the significant of the war.
“’What did you want?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘To stay alive’” (183). “Now, look out the
field, I wondered if it was a mistake. Everything was too ordinary…, and the field
was not the field I remembered” (184). Again, the Sentimental Discourse the author
applies here involves individual experiences, single feelings and philosophical
introspection－to replace the sad and dim scene in the past with the peaceful and
clear scene in the present. “The field was still there, though not as I remembered it”
(181). “No ghost－just a flat, grassy field. The place was at peace”. Through this
juxtaposition, the author allows the readers to put the scene of Kiowa’s death away
and begin thinking about the significance of war to the author.
Memory is a precious matter for human beings. Of course, it doesn’t fit to
anyone just like Norman Bowker’s case. However, for Tim O’Brien (the actual writer,
#1), the memory helps him to look back to the war and then he calls it as love. “It’s
about love and memory” (85). He intends to narrate the war novel from the angles－
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true, good, and beauty. However, he also expresses his sorrow that the female readers
may still reject to listen to the war story. The last two sentences in “How to Tell a True
War Story” are: “It about sisters who never write back and people who never listen”
(85). Maybe that’s the reason that the author forms a distant beauty which is designed
by “adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth” (85). As a
result, the novel we read is filled of good and agreeable stuff. And the novel in the end
really fits to the goal what the author says: “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story”
(85). The author’s desire is to write this war novel as a love story. This novel has
some common attributes as the general ones that include the love affairs between men
and woman. However, the novel contains much more love deriving from the author to
write a pleasant war story. Depending on the memory, the author products the novel
presenting on an insider’s view point and thus the work is animate. It is completely
diverse from those war novels or reports coming from the outsiders never experience
the war as a soldier. The author hopes the readers could read the novel as a love story
or a novel relating to the honor and pride. This novel tells us the history human beings
go through. The author expects the readers believe that the people in war may feel
suffering, scare and confused but there are also virtues, love, and pride in the war
field.
Excepting “love”, “Friendship” conveys stories of care and harmony. “[T]he
war wasn’t all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet” (31).
The author mentions the child with plastic legs and the old man’s tear. Moreover, the
friendship between Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen in the war field also impresses
readers with the love and bond between two soldiers. The author also tells about the
love story of Jimmy Cross and Marsha in “Love”, the touchable and sweet story in
“Spin”, the moral confusion in “On the Rainy River”, the definition of true courage in
“Dentist” and “Speaking of Courage”, the power of love and loving nature in
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“Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, the friendliness and good in “Church”, and so on.
In some senses, these positive human traits are products of war and serve as
interludes in the novel. They are suspended moments of good, and the author
alternates these themes with stories of dishonor and the negative aspects of human
nature seen in war.
“A true war story is never moral, it does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, …”
(68). The author deeply realizes that the war material cannot possibly be linked to
morality, instruction, or virtue. That is, his war novel has basically nothing to do with
the so-called “good 6”－the judgment of whether something is ethical or moral－in
Kant’s theory. The clever author thus applies another narrative approach of being
“agreeable 7”－the agreeable is a purely sensory judgment based on inclination alone.
It is a subjective reflection of the material around us, such as judgments in the form of
“That bed is comfortable,” or “That clothing is soft.” The author hopes that the
readers realize that Lemon vanished in a condition of joy, and he hopes that the
readers will feel no sadness or fear. The author deliberately uses the discourse
concerning the “agreeable” (love stories) and the “good” (friendship, love, and
courage), corresponding to Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment.
Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment discusses four kinds of “reflective
judgments” on aesthetics. After the “agreeable” and the “good”, the third judgment is
the “beautiful 8”, which occupies a space between the agreeable and the good. The
“beautiful” is an attractive form here designed for a purpose. The author elevates the
6
The good related to the judgment of that something is ethical or moral, including virtues or some
good manners, such as filial piety, faithful, or obedience.
7
The agreeable is a purely sensory judgment based on inclination alone. It is a subjective reflection to
the material around us, such as judgments in the form of “That bed is comfortable,” or “That clothing is
soft.”
8
The beautiful in Kant’s theory can be used to describe beautiful things which aim to please others; for
instance, the flower is beautiful or the sunset is beautiful. Or it can also be made with belief or design
to make others agree with the judgments, even if it is known that many will not. Take Picasso’s
paintings, for example; some people may think his pictures are beautiful, but some may not agree.
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beautiful of the war by his narrative art, including the usage of language and the
balanced orders of the chapters and the identity of the characters. For instance: “Like
when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. ‘How’s the war today?’
somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say,
‘Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today’” (33); and “It was a sad
scene when the choppers came to take us away. Jimmy Cross gave the old poppa-san
a hug… There were actually tears in the old guy’s eyes. ‘Follow dink,’ he said to each
of us, ‘you go pink’” (33- 4). After presenting the gloomy and melancholy “The
Things They Carried”, the author arranges “Love” and “Spin”; he puts “Friends” after
“Enemies”; and “Church” precedes “The Man I Killed”. The author understands that
people prefer to read matters concerning “truth” and “goodness”, and he therefore
carefully walks the line between the true and the untrue, thus successfully presenting
the cruel facts of death without causing unnecessary pressure and fear to his readers.
Furthermore, the war stories that we occasionally read tell of soldiers’ daily
lives in the army or in the bloody war field. These stories are presented as the records
of a certain era of history. Such a novel is similar to the historical records of real
people who have witnessed real historical events. We read that “Kiowa teaches a rain
dance to his comrades”, that “Ted Lavender adopts an orphan puppy”, and about the
“chant being made up by Rat Kiley”. He describes the characters’ chats, friendship
and love in replacement of the grand and heroic battles in the war. That is to say, in
this novel, the author tells war stories which are “[n]ot bloody stories, necessarily.
Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories” (35). The author gives us more
emotional and acceptable war stories by portraying the peacefulness and happiness in
the war.
“[T] he fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and
shape and proportion, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship,
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the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the
rocket’s red glare” (81). In essence, this is the use of beautiful language to present the
condition of the march. The judgment of something as “beautiful” is decided by each
individual’s belief. We, the readers, may make judgments by our concepts. Maybe the
author thinks that the truth is that war is “beauty” in some respects. After the sight of
the march, the author states, “ …any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has
aesthetical purity of absolute moral indifference－powerful, implacable beauty”. After
experiencing the whole reading process, we finally learn about the terror and the ugly
truth. The author calls it “the beauty of absolute moral indifference”. Maybe the
author is right, if we do not consider “the good” of morality. However, the ugly truth
behind this beauty may bring us fear rather than a sense of beauty. The writing
technique－the “beautiful”－the author applies could achieve the aim of attracting
readers to appreciate the war novel, yet it is hard to uplift readers because the war
story involves the issue of the concept of the “morality”, and the readers may be
bound by this.
“If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of the war story you feel
uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the
larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There
is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue” (68-9). There are no morals or virtues
in war materials, so maybe that is the reason why we have no way to overcome our
fear and achieve an uplifting feeling. Traumatic war novels are comparable in
attributes to tragedies, which also set off pity and fear in audiences. Nevertheless, the
consequences that they bring to their audiences are dissimilar. Tragedies usually
contain morality or virtues according to Aristotle being aides or illuminators to uplift
audiences in order to overcome the feelings of pity and fear. Take Oedipus, the
persona in Greek tragedy, for example; he murders his father and unwittingly marries
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his mother. Faced with the destiny, he puts out his eyes. That ending gives a terrible
shock to us, yet the sentimental response of astonishment would gradually disappear.
His misery results from his impetuousness, excessive pride, and self-confidence in
human intelligence. After knowing the causes resulting in his misfortune, we may
thus learn modesty and act with caution. In other words, tragedies may offer us
opportunities to learn how to “cope with” the pain and “deal with” it as well. But war
stories lack moral and virtues. That is, we may learn to cope with pain and fear, but
there are no ways to deal with them (to uplift ourselves).
When the author tells us that “a true war story is never moral” (68), he then
tells a story about the voices of morality. All of these words in “How to Tell a True
War Story” perhaps make the readers question whether the author is writing logically
or whether he is trying to infer something to us that he cannot or would not like to say
directly. The words he writes are filled with contradiction: “War is hell, but that’s not
the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and
discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is
fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead”
(80). War is too complicated to identify it is moral or immoral, because we also see
good things in it. Without doubt, war is immoral but there are virtues (courage, pity,
and love) in it. The lines above just like the generalization making by the author who
looks back the incident he struggled long time ago. He is now remembering the past
and concluding that the war is not a hundred percent an ugly thing but a complicated
thing for possessing too much extreme attributes.
The author summarizes the war: “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued,
for instance, the war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror,
you can’t help but gasp at the awful majesty of combat” (80). Readers may have no
ideas about the meaning of beauty the author expresses here and may doubt the
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authors’ words. The “beauty” that the author labels here belongs to a kind of scare in
human nature which human beings would reject it in the begging. But after the
feeling of fear fades away, we may then appreciate it. This kind of emotion seems to
similarly fit to Kant’s forth judgment on aesthetics－“sublime 9”. It is a kind of beauty
meaning we feel fear at the beginning but then feel sublime in the end. The war may
make the author feel fear twenty years ago. But the time abates the feeling of scare in
the author’s mind. The sense of the war field is far away from him and when the
author rememorizes it again twenty-five years later, the author narrates the war sense
is “awful” but “majesty”. Definitely, the war is awful but the scene of war field is
magnificent. The author’s feeling of fear fading away, yet his description that war is
beauty may hard to persuade readers. But maybe to tell the story that way for him is
not only because that’s the true feeling of him after returning from the Vietnam war
for twenty-five years but also because achieving his aim of telling a love story to his
readers.
The author attempts to demonstrate refined characteristics of human beings. He
mentions Tim O’Brien (the narrator, #2) flees away from war for defend his belief of
moral. Norman Bowker who is extremely a self-asking person who commits suicide
for he cannot face the stains of his reputation of bravery. And Mary Ann risks her life
to leave for the war field for her lover. He embellishes the sufferings human beings
bear. The morality cannot exist in war, but the author thinks it can be felt and intuited
by human nature. Although there is no morality in war, there are virtues in it, like
friendship. To cover the ugly truth in war, he tells his readers that nothing is
absolutely true in the truth war story. All the staffs in the novel almost give us the fine
9
The sublime in Kant’s book is the beautifulness without purpose –purposivelessness. Kant calls it
“purposivelessness” because the sublime is usually out of the order and beyond human beings’
understanding. We feel fear at the moment we see the objects. However, when the threat ceases, the
consequent feelings are joy and pleasure. For instance, people may feel fear at seeing Niagara Falls
because it is so huge that people may thus feel being in danger. But after the threat comes to an end, we
may appreciate its natural beauty.
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feeling. The writing techniques of beautifying are not only to promote the novel but
also to relieve the pain and struggles.
66
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Chapter 5
Conclusion
Norman Bowker fails to survive his traumas. The author narrates him mainly in
“Speaking of Courage”, in which the author defines the meaning of the so-called
“courage” for him. If we read between the lines, we can observe that there are some
characteristics in common between Norman Bowker and Tim O’Brien. Norman
Bowker struggles with whether to express the sore point in his psyche, and Tim
O’Brien suffers from his dreams. We know that Norman Bowker’s sore point is that
he cannot speak out about his responsibility for Kiowa’s death, and he persists in
defending his reputation of bravery. Yet, for Tim O’Brien, we seem to have no clues
to know about that. Nevertheless, in “Field Trip”, Tim O’Brien is haunted by the
scene of Kiowa’s death. He says, “we visited the site of Kiowa’s death, where I
looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might
offer” (O’Brien 181). Do these lines imply that the author and Norman Bowker are
actually the same person, and that the dream which still wakes the author up twenty
years after the war is also about the death of Kiowa? Later lines may provide an
answer: ”In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman
Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not
experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for
valor. That part of the story is my own” (161). Perhaps, they made experiences here,
or Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) takes over some of Norman Bowker’s
experiences.
Moreover, in the last chapter of this novel, Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #2 or
sometimes the character, #3) gives a briefly introduction himself. “…it becomes 1990.
I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now,…” (245). Then, when he browses his own
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history, he mentions that “I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow
floodlight…” (246). Timmy suddenly replaces the role of Tim O’Brien (the actual
writer, #1). So, Timmy and the Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) could also be the
same person. The author strongly hints to us that Timmy (the character) is Tim
O’Brien (the actual writer, #1). Or, he is saying “I remember doing this” but referring
to his child-self in the third person. Later on, he says that “…when I take a high leap
into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save
Timmy’s life with a story” (246). According to this line, the author tells us that he
sees the war story he wrote as a means to save his life and help him to continue his
life after the war.
Norman has no courage to tell his father about his cowardice. Coincidentally,
Tim shows his weakness in front of Father. The “father” and the “Father” are different.
The former is the real father who tells us to follow the customs and the man-made
laws in the country; the latter is the one who asks us to follow the natural law based
on human nature. Tim the Father is the person who will be by you sides at anytime.
The Father in this novel may also imply that Norman’s father should be present
anytime when his children feel helplessness. We know that throughout the story
Norman takes no action to tell his father. Maybe that is why Tim O’Brien (the actual
person, #2) invents an old man named Elroy, embodies him as “The Father”, and gets
along with Him. In front of Him, Tim O’Brien has no need to talk because the old
man knows him very well; he knows what he plans to say and do. At Rainy River, he
knows that he has no place to hide, and that he has no need to hide. He releases
himself and does not have to define himself. This kind of feeling is actually what
Norman craves when he gets together with his father. He has no need to imagine his
dialogues with his father and guess his father’s reaction. From these clues, we can
infer that Tim O’Brien (the actual person, #1) seems to use the character of Norman
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Bower to achieve the aim of expressing his inner pressure which cannot be
discharged.
In the last chapter, Tim O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) ends this novel with a
sentimental and positive discourse hinting to us that he saved himself by writing the
war story. Through writing, Tim O’Brien discharges his traumatic war burden,
making it possible to escape from the “traumatic situation”. However, as mentioned in
Chapter One of this thesis, he has not successfully achieved the goal of Transference.
His discourses in the last chapter seems to reveal some signs to show that he is
willing to let his war memory become history (the past), and that he sees his traumatic
memories as the experiences which give him power and the will to get a new life.
Actually, this is a sign of someone who desires to speak out about traumas and
transfer them. Therefore, if Tim O’Brien can speak about his sore point, it is possible
for him to transfer his traumatic pain and get away from his traumas once and for all.
This is a work of fiction, but it is also a semi-autobiography. As we know, Tim
O’Brien (the actual writer, #1) fictionalizes his war novel in many parts. We must
therefore rely on clues given by the author to find out his true meaning of these
stories. The author seems to try very hard to hide his real identity, which makes it
harder to discover that real truth. Nevertheless, there is one thing we can be sure of:
that the war novel is not an easy story to tell. The author creates writing techniques
biasing to the sensory beauty. Therefore, the more immoral and abnormal the content
of the story, the more creative fabrications need to be added. The scene of Curt
Lemon’s death portrayed as a “romantic story” and the story about six guys, who hear
the voices of “the moral” in the mountain, are two typical examples of this.
Consequently, some aspects of the story may gradually become less faithful to the
truth. Therefore, facing this unchangeable truth, it is best for us, the readers, to follow
the author’s writing strategy and adhere to the manner in which he hoped for us to
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read it. Tim O’Brien, (the actual writer, #1), writes this novel by sentimental
discourses with minimal mention of cruel incidents; we follow as he tells these stories
in the belief that, through his hints and suggestions, we will be able to understand
what he intends to convey to his readers.
It is interesting that the author describes the scene of Kiowa’s death in “In the
Field”, then in the following chapter “Field Trip” narrates that he went back to
Vietnam twenty years later with his family to visit the field on which Kiowa died. He
leads his reader to feel the so-called “story-truth and happening-truth” that he
undertakes. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer
sometimes than happening-truth” (179). The “story-truth” was the story in the past in
“In the Field”, and the “happening-truth” is that of the “Field Trip”－a
forty-three-year writer who is still suffering from the invisible responsibility and grief.
In “In the Field”, we read the story of the death of a twenty-year-old-old young man,
Kiowa, and the self-accusation of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. But, in “Field Trip”, the
author uses the same scene to show an innocent young girl with her father, named
Tim O’Brien, who is preoccupied by some troubles in his heart twenty years later.
we ,the readers, would care much about the relations between the story-truth and the
happening truth. Yet, the author tells us that the information he intends to tell us is
that the story-truth haunts him and even occupies more space in his mind than the
happening-truth.
This novel involves the author’s memory in war. He writes a war novel, a
made-up story, but he doesn’t hide himself. We see him show up in the book for many
times. There will be some hints that he expects that we can found out or pay attention
to. The author recollects his memory experiencing twenty years ago. After so many
years, there may be something that he didn’t understand before but now he
comprehends. So, maybe that’s why the author occasionally appears some times to
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narrate the things that he has new thinking in the present day. Besides, he applies the
narrator to tell the story he underwent in the past－the story- truth. Nevertheless, the
author doesn’t narrate his memory and his new understanding to the war directly and
clearly. When we read the “On the Rainy River”, we are curious about the identity of
the mysterious persona－the old man. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, we
puzzle where Mary Ann goes and what happens to her after she leaves. Maybe the
author tells us the story this in order to covers something, but this kind of narrative
skill successfully to enhance the attractions of this novel.
In “The Lives of the Death”, the last chapter in this novel, the author focuses on
death. The author stops talking about the story in the war field, mentioning his first
experiences seeing people (his first love, Linda) die, and recalling the death of his
comrades. Perhaps he tries to make use of the death of his friends to bring the war to
an end in his life, returning to his present life and beginning life anew. However, it is
not the chapter focuses on death moves away from the war. In the end of this chapter,
he uses Linda’s words and says, “‘Once you’re alive … you can’t ever be dead’” (244)
and tells us he can still sometimes see Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Linda.
The author seems to hint that although those things in the past fade away, he knows
that it is impossible to delete his personal history in the war from his life, as his dead
friends still emerge in his memories and dreams. The last chapter seems to imply that
even though the war ends, the memory and war traumas will never be erased from the
author’s mind. Therefore, focusing on the issue of death may actually convey the
message that death does not mean the end, but may represent the endless pain in the
author’s life. For the author or the readers, such an ending to a war story serves as a
great solution to the complex and thorny war material. We, the readers, feel the
author’s sorrow and sadness towards his history, and his helplessness to deal with
historical war trauma. In the end of the novel, there is no happy ending, no answers to
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the war traumas, no morality, and no uplifting closure; rather, we are left with endless
sorrow and helplessness.
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