The Lives of the Dead: Linda

When I first started this chapter, my thoughts were something along the lines of Linda? Who's Linda? Then I felt bad, and I started thinking about how after a while, a big number is the same number no matter how big it is. How many people died in 9/11? Was it a thousand or a million or a billion? I have no idea. All of those are just a lot. I already don't remember how many people died in this book, but I know all of it was tragic.

Then I realized Linda hadn't been introduced yet, and I felt better, but still.

The soldiers felt it too:

"There was a formality to it, like a funeral without the sadness." - p. 215

One can only be sad about things for so long.

"It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. 'Just a crunchie munchie,' Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body."

Aside from the fact that those are terribly disturbing euphemisms, O'Brien is pointing out what the Nazis illustrated--that it's easy to dismiss something if it's not human in our eyes.

Also, "Rat Kiley liked to spice it up with extra details." - p. 227

That means he's HYPERBOLIZING! YAAAAAAAY!

"Death sucks," page 230, is an understatement, if you ask me, and "Do I look dead?" on page 231 is a rhetorical question, I believe. Also, "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you can't ever be dead," is sort of an aphorism, and it reminds me of a moment in Harry Potter, which eloquently points out the Christian belief in the afterlife:

"The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

"Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in their meaning, and he read the last of them aloud.

"'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death'..." A horrible thought came to him, and with it a kind of panic. "Isn't that a Death Eater idea? Why is that there?"

"It doesn't mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry," said Hermione, her voice gentle. "It means... you know... living beyond death. Living after death." - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, p. 328

They have the a common moral, The Things They Carried and Harry Potter. This is why I liked this book better than The Sun Also Rises.

Night Life: A Euphemism

"For almost two weeks, Sanders said, they lived the night life. That was the phrase everyone used: the night life. A language trick. It made things seem tolerable. How's the Nam treating you? one guy would ask, and some other guy would say, Hey, one big party, just living the night life." - p. 208

It calls to mind Vegas rather than the terrifyingly absoluteness of the dark they actually faced each night.

That feels like juxtaposition to me, but that could also be because I just realized I haven't said a word about juxtapositions, and I just read Christian Powers' latest blog post.

Definitely, though, the "Night Life" is a euphemism for just the reason O'Brien outlines.

Also:

"He'd be sitting there talking with Bowker or Dobbins or somebody, just marking time, and then out of nowhere he'd find himself wondering how much the guy's head weighed, like how heavy it was, and what it would feel like to pick up the head and carry it over to a chopper and dump it in." - p. 211

In marching band, "marking time" is standing at attention while moving the heels up and down to the beat of the music, and marching band gets a lot of its drill nonsense from the army. Consequently, I'm imagining this:

Okay, so not exactly that, but it's what I found when I was searching for marching bands marching time, and I couldn't pass it up because THAT'S WHAT WE'RE PLAYING THIS YEAR, AAAAH!

I think we're doing it better already, but maybe I'm biased =}. Also we dance a whole lot less, for which I am immensely grateful.

The Ghost Soldiers: Pain in the Butt

"When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world." - p. 183

That makes me think about adrenaline junkies.

...Sorry. I really do not even like Twilight anymore.

"You don't just mess around like that. You don't just fritter away all your luck." - p. 187

That concept of using up a certain lifetime luck quota reminded me of a semi-conscious notion that I've always had that everybody shares the same ratio of happiness to unhappiness. I like to believe that whether you die in infancy or of old age, everyone's time on earth shares an equal percentage of happiness. It's semi-conscious, of course, because now that it's completely conscious, I am forced to dismiss it. Babies... don't know happiness or unhappiness yet, really. At least I don't think so. They know comfort and discomfort, but they're babies, so mostly they're uncomfortable unless they're sleeping. That was sort of pointless, I guess.

Anyway, Azar is creepy. "Star light, star bright!" he says of the flares on page 205.

I'm not sure nursery rhyme allusions belong on the battlefield, real-time battle or otherwise.

Field Trip: Happy Birthday

Now, try to resist the urge to follow me into this former pond of poo.

I've had a rough time identifying any antimetabole in anything, but I think I found one:

"Now, it was just what it was." - p. 176

Wait, just kidding. Those are in the same grammatical order. Are we sure these exist in actual literature?

Imagery, on the other hand.... That stuff's all over the place:

"There were yellow butterflies. There was a breeze and a wide blue sky." - p. 173

I can't say it's terribly effective, though. I mean, I'm not going to forget how that place used to look and feel and smell, and I was never even there, actually. Really, I guess his point is the change in the place; it's relatively nice and peaceful there now. "Relatively" must be the key word in that sentence, however. I mean, seriously... the place was gross.

Good Form: Uh-oh

I already talked about how Tim didn't really kill the one guy.

"...twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough." - p. 171

Then he goes on to say that's not even true either, and here's the part where I'm just going to be talking in circles, I think. "I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." - p. 171

I understand that; really I do. I sort of do, anyway. I feel like that sentence is itself a lie, but I have to believe it because that's what his entire moral seems to be. It doesn't matter, though; I want to know what really happened and what didn't. I don't like this feeling of being inundated with lies.

Notes: He used a jump rope.

"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." - p. 154

I can't help but think that this particular admission would have been of more use to Norman Bowker before he hung himself with that jump rope. =\ I'm not blaming O'Brien; Norman clearly had some deep-seated problems, but I almost feel that if he was writing the story with Norman's reading first in mind, the guy should've had a happier ending.

I mean, the guy hanged himself eight months after he read it. O'Brien made sure to point that out, so I feel like this chapter is primarily a profession of his own feelings of guilt.

Aside from that, I really don't have much to say about this chapter. I scoured page after page for lit-terms-in-action, and I found zero. I could talk about how round the characters of Norman and Tim are, I suppose. I mean... Tim's a real-life man, and Norman's allegedly a post-real-life man, so that's pretty much to be expected. Still... appreciate the dimensions, I guess.

Speaking of Courage: Almost

"When the girl brought his tray, he ate quickly, without looking up. The tired radio announcer in Des Moines gave the time, almost eight-thirty. Dark was pressing in tight now, and he wished there were somewhere to go." - p. 145

'"Hey, loosen up," the voice said. "What you really need, friend?"

Norman Bowker smiled.

"Well," he said, how'd you like to hear about--"

He stopped and shook his head.

"Hear what, man?"

"Nothing."' - p. 146

Those two passages both painted a picture of loneliness. The thing is, apart from the letter that Tim may or may not have received from Norman Bowker, he can't know just how Norman felt, and that reminds me of a game played on a road trip in the book Paper Towns called That Guy Is a Gigolo.

"In the game, you imagine the lives of people in the cars around you." - Paper Towns, p. 257

The guys discover that actually, their ideas about these strangers tells more about them, the highway-hypnotized teenagers, than about the strangers in the cars around them. It's a thing called projection. O'Brien has felt this way himself, and that is why he can portray it so accurately.

Those passages also reminded me of this song:

I think I also spotted some onomatopoeia in this chapter. Correct me if I'm wrong:

"The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth." - p. 142

Slushy is a real word, but the sounds of which the word is composed are also the sounds a slushy field makes when one steps in it, which is what makes the word such a useful adjective. The same can be said of the word "bubbling," although I think it's an adverb as it's used in that sentence.