Question 4
How does love figure into the development of the text? What is O’Brien trying to say about the relationship between love and war?
In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien brings a story of the American platoon soldiers who were deployed to fight for a good course in the Vietnam War. The whole novel is a collection of stories of the experiences of these soldiers during their time in the jungle as they fought far away from home. As the narrator, O’Brien brings a clear picture of the real and fictitious occurrences in the battlefield. Although the central theme of the novel is war, O’Brien incorporates the element of love to demonstrate how emotional attachment had an influence on the attitude, efforts and hopes of these soldiers. This paper gives a critical and in-depth analysis of the inclusion of love in the story. It goes further to discuss about the relationship between war and love as presented in the novel.
Although most of the soldiers were to carrying properties such as mosquito repellent, chewing gums, marijuana, New Testament and pocket knives, some like Henry Dobbins chose to behave in a very strange manner. He instead opted to carry his girlfriend’s pantyhose. As a superstitious young man, he believed that wearing his girlfriend’s stockings around his neck, while in the battlefield or sleeping would help in protecting him from his enemies. To him, emotional attachment to his girlfriend was a necessary thing during such a time of need. This is a clear indication of how love influenced the activities of these soldiers. Had it not been for such a belief, Henry would not have survived the war. It means that he could not forget about his lover even if he was far away from him and had dumped him (D’Amore and O’Brien 33).
As a platoon leader, the readers expect Jimmy Cross to be the most committed and disciplined personnel. However, it astonishes to see him succumb to romantic distress when he keeps on remembering his (former) girlfriend Martha. Instead of carrying important properties based on his rank, he chooses to carry Martha’s ‘love’ letters along side her photos in his backpack. He is obsessed with his girlfriend Martha whom he had left back home when enlisted in the war. He keeps reading her letters and longs to have her next to her bed so as to embrace and feel her beautiful knees. It is this condition that resulted into the death of Lavender Ted who was slain during an ambush, at a time when Cross was carried away by the memories of Martha. This is clear indication of how love could negatively affect the performance of soldiers in the battlefield.
A similar scenario was experienced by other soldiers including Mark Fossie, Norman Bowker and Rat Kiley who could not accept to live without their girlfriends. Since he could not survive without her, Fossie had to send for his girlfriend Mary Anne Bell to be with him in his base in Vietnam. However, he later regrets as it turns disastrous when Lavender dies. A similar situation is evidenced in the tales of Rat Kiley in which O’Brien says that his lust for love compelled Rat to do the same. During his first assignment, Rat had no choice, but to fly his girlfriend to the battlefield where she helped him a great deal. Apart from cooking and cleaning for him, she nursed her wounds. This shows how inspirational and supportive love could be to the soldiers (Bruckner 67).
The lifestyles of these soldiers demonstrate how influential love was during the war. Even if they were taken to fight far away from home, they could not forget about their past romantic experiences. As youths, these soldiers’ romantic life had been interrupted by the war. For this reason, many of them could not cope up with life in the absence of their sweethearts. This explains why people like Cross, Fosie, Henry and Rat had to behave so strangely. The feeling of having someone who loves them instilled hopes in them. By reading Martha’s poems, he managed to forget about his agonies. It motivated Cross to fight hard to finish the war and reunite with Martha whom he had been missing all along. Love is symbolically used to show how war can shitter people’s dreams which might end up unfulfilled after war just the same way Norman Bowker and Cross failed to marry their childhood sweethearts when their love was interrupted by the lonely life in the jungle.
Works Cited
Bruckner, D. J. R. "Storyteller for a War that Won't End." The New York Times (3 Apr. 1990):
C15. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism.Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt.Vol. 103. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resource Center.Web. 6 Nov. 2014.
D’Amore, Jonathan and Tim O’Brien. “Every Question Leads to the Next: An Interview with
Tim O’Brien.” Carolina Quarterly 58.2 (Spring 2007): 31-39. Literature Resource Center.Web. 29 October 2014.
Silbergleid, Robin. “Making Things Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical Metafiction.”
Contemporary Literature 50.1 (Spring 2009): 129-155. Literature Resource Center.Web. 24 October 2014.
