10/12/2023 0 Comments Tim obrien quotesBut Dobbins, who is the more sympathetic character, sees the girls' innate humanness and tries to understand her as he would understand an American, as someone with a will and tastes. Her village was just burned, her family was killed, and she is dancing. 'Probably some weird ritual,' Azar said, but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance." "Style"įor one soldier, Azar, the dancing girl symbolizes the unknowability and otherness of the Vietnamese. "A while later, when we moved out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. She abandoned her boyfriend for the country, for killing. It could completely change their mind about everything. She is a symbol of what Vietnam could do to a person. But she soon became fascinated with killing, fell in with a group of Green Berets, and vanished into the countryside. She started out as an innocent blonde, wearing culottes and a pink sweater. Mary Anne was the girlfriend of a soldier who he had shipped over to Vietnam to accompany him. She was ready for the kill." "Sweetheart of the Tra Bong" ![]() ![]() She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. Although the soldier finds ammunition on the dead man, he still feels he shouldn't have killed him. The details of his child-like figure show O'Brien's guilt. The dead Vietnamese man is not a casualty, but another human being who had a story that can be imagined. The details all mark the observer as a humane man, a man who recognizes the humanity in others. This is the description of the man Tim O'Brien killed with a hand grenade. His wrists were the wrists of a child." "The Man I Killed" His chest was sunken and poorly muscled - a scholar, maybe. He had bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers. "He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man. Or at the very least to ease his own troubled conscience. But O'Brien thinks that stories have the power to help people escape from repeating the past. His daughter, Kathleen, implores him to give up the topic of the war, to find something else to fixate on. He worries about honesty, about what happened as opposed to what makes a good, true story. O'Brien constantly questions what it is to be a writer, a teller of war stories. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. ![]() "Stories are for joining the past to the future. This is why he goes to war, and it is the book's signature moment of cowardice. He imagines the FBI after him, he imagines the disappointment of his parents and of his girlfriends. A friendly man has rowed him all the way across the river at the border, but O'Brien just cannot get out of the boat and swim the rest of the way. This is the climactic point of the story in which Tim O'Brien has decided to flee the war and run away to Canada. It just wasn't possible." "On the Rainy River" I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, now." She always holds herself distant, physically and emotionally. The sadness has to do with a "secret" that Martha keeps, possibly that she has been raped. ![]() Tweed is an appropriate fabric for Martha, who was always very proper. This is physically the closest he ever gets to her, although he dreams about her the whole time he is in Vietnam, and possibly it is his laxity that gets Lavender killed. Jimmy Cross is obsessed by memories of Martha, who writes him letters but is not exactly his sweetheart. "A dark theater, he remembered, and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt, and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back." "The Things They Carried"
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