I don’t typically attract to war stories. To me, a war story is gruesome, bloody, violent, and someone always wins (which never seemed realistic to me). Tim O’Brien seems to have a similar view to myself. O’Brien breaks the war story genre by giving us tid-bits of scenarios dealing with feelings. Since I can remember, American’s view on war has always been numbers, whether it has to do with casualties, survivors, soldiers… O’Brien gives us the feelings soldiers felt and dealt with through out the war.
“Here is the happening-truth. I was once a solider. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.” (Good Form 204). O’Brien writes a very memorial aspect of a soldier’s story. He makes the reader feel the speaker’s feelings and understand his mindset. Many war stories just show the overall happenings, and do not show us each individual’s struggles.
In “The Man I Killed” O’Brien shows two soldiers attempting to make sense of what actually goes on when they kill someone. One felt extensive guilt and the other was attempting to convince his mate that it was okay, “‘Tim, it’s a war. The guy wasn’t Heidi—he had weapon, right? It’s a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring.’” (141).In O’Brien’s war story Tim was a real man, with feelings and we are let to be exposed to the reality of war. This is definitely taking us out of the realm of traditional genre of war stories.
Daniel Chandler’s analysis on “Genre Theory” tells us that people use genres to fill a comfort zone. O’Brien’s stories would perhaps make war-story admires upset. Chandler states that “pleasure is derived from ‘repetition and difference’”. Due to O’Brien’s eclectic style of writing, many readers who are familiar of such a genre, might feel a bit in shock when the emotional aspect of war is deeply portrayed. Readers might expect hardcore action and not the emotional roller coast, for example, Tim puts out during the shooting of the Vietnamese solder.
Overall, I believe that O’Brien does an amazing job testing the expectations of war stories. He keeps certain aspects but has created a war-drama genre all of his own.
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4 comments:
I thought it was very interesting how you came up with the genre O'Brien was writing in and how it was a new "war/drama". i completely agree that what we have expected from war stories is gore and violence and a focus on that rather than feeling. We focus far to much on casualities and the fact that it is just a number and the more that have been killed declares the winner. With this view, we seem to have lost the expectation of humanity.
I apprecite how you incorporated Chandler's idea of the comfort zone and how O'Brien challenges this by including feeling and going into the mindset of the soldiers, a missing aspect in typical war stories.
like you mentioned that this story dealt with what soldiers had felt through out the whole war situation, that was precisely what had captured me. And as i'm not exactly a fan of war stories, this story was quite refreshing and i liked how you differenciated the uniqueness of this story from other typical ones.
I completely agree that WAR movies generally display blood and violence rather than the feelings and perspectives of the soldiers at war, and as you brought up O'Brien definitely makes the Reader understand what someone at war might be experiencing mentally and emotional in the midst of all the drama that is caused by war.
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