David P. Martin
John Michael Toth
English 102
9-30-2012
Writers
of literature usually mean to create a better understanding of a
situation they themselves have learned from. In other words, writers
are, in their own way, instructors of their audience. Arguably, the
most important lessons can be directly seen in how characters such as
Eva in “The Found Boat” or Lieutenant Cross in “The Things They
Carried” change and develop throughout the story. By analyzing
exactly what makes these characters change, and through holistic
consideration of all contributing psychosocial factors, readers can
learn valuable things about people and their personal development.
Tim
O’Brien's “The Things They Carried” can be compared to a
lecture from someone with first-hand experience in being a soldier at
war. Warfighters are subject to a very common stereotype of
humanity, which points out the ferocity of those that carry weapons
and mean to shoot people with them. O'Brien explains that much of
the burden a soldier carries is abstract. In almost every paragraph
of this selection from “The Things They Carried”, is some
incorporation of feeling that O'Brien lumps in with all the other
concrete things that most people easily know to be burdensome. This
is summed up by the line, “They carried all they could bare, and
then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the
things they carried”. Through this close relationship of feelings
and physical weight, O'Brien is able to point out humanity in the
most un-human duties. O'Brien includes examples of pride, fear,
guilt, love, and how they can contribute to something as awful as
warfare. His account of his experience in Vietnam tells of all these
burdens objectively, and, to be fair, includes some of the morbid
realities of how soldiers handle their emotions. Largely, they have
to make light of things: “They used hard vocabulary to contain the
terrible softness”. These verbal coping strategies culminate into
their own language, which O'Brien does his best to translate for the
inexperienced reader. O'Brien makes a good point of a soldier's need
to be “between crazy and almost crazy, knowing without going”.
This
degree of toughness is necessary in some cases. This story creates a
very good line of sight for a reader to understand what makes a
person into a soldier.
“The
Found Boat” by Alice Munroe can be seen as a field-trip through a
few months in the lives of a group of young neighborhood kids. The
author's choice of detail directly probes the reader's memory, by
putting some of the kids' actions and tendencies into simple grown-up
language. She begins the story by funneling the reader's attention
into this analytical comparison between young and mature, by citing a
trend solely based on age: “those under 15 and over 65 were most
certain that it [the Flood] would [invade the town].” In the
beginning, the girls are more distant from the boys. When Munroe
includes that the girls were surprised at the boys' interest in the
boat they found, the reader can start to follow the path of baby
steps the boys and girls will take toward a cooperative alliance.
Continuing the path, Munroe includes an example of jealousy, marked
by Eva and Carol's “fish mouths of contempt”. So already, we
have a perfect launching pad for a story of unity between boys and
girls, plus a comparing aspect for older readers to understand the
developing minds of young kids. Later on when they are repairing the
boat together, the point is made that Eva “wanted to make a good
impression on Clayton's mother,” again, we see another age-specific
interaction, putting obvious detail on Eve's intentions. This
emphasizes the variety of drives a child may be influenced by, which
is built upon later in the story, when hints of passion are eluded to
when the kids go for a dip in the river. Hopefully, this story can
help the reader, many of whom are future parents, understand how
children think.
The
focus of James Joyce's “Araby” is a lesson in a unique subject
unfamiliar to many. The lesson collectively attainable from this
story is about what can become of a young soul suppressed and
misunderstood. The setting of the story is dark and bleak. The
speaker's social life is limited to strategic games of avoidance with
the neighborhood kids and parents. The imbalance cultivates a skill
set which spills into his flirting tactics: “when we came to the
point where our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her.”
His attitude towards people is reflected by his imagining the people
in his “single sensation of life” as a “throng of foes”.
Throughout the story, the narrator focuses on his thoughts, which are
almost entirely internalized. He jumps around from random details of
his environment, to the constant battle that plagues his imagination,
where realism and hope get confused with each other and his fears.
No connection is made between his random daydreaming of Mangan and
what may have sparked the dream in that moment. Evidence of his
largely suppressed anger is confirmed in his reaction to his aunt's
claim about the “night air”: “when she left I began to walk up
and down the room, clenching my fists.” Almost immediately after
this, we see the ultimate proof of his anguish: “My eyes were often
full of tears... I thought little of the future”. So the reader
must wonder why the narrator has become this way. One possible cause
for the narrator's subdued relationship with people is evident in two
interactions with the people he spends the most time around: first,
“when my aunt went marketing, I had to go to carry some of the
parcels...,” and second, when his uncle had forgotten about his
plans to go to the bazaar. Both sentences feature an abrupt absence
of passion in the narrator's diction. Almost everything any of the
other characters say has this similar lack of passion, or some
non-caring, arrogant undertone, including the members of his family,
having the effect of lumping them in as equals to any enemy on the
street. The narrator's adoption of a generally adversarial
relationship with people is suspiciously linked to a family that
makes him feel like an accessory. This story can show the reader how
much anguish a kid is capable of harboring when expression is
discouraged. Joyce uses striking imagery and detail in describing
the feelings that no one (likely including himself) saw as important
at the time: the combination of unsatisfied love and unbearable
social anxiety. This could indicate that still, at the age of
thirty-two, Joyce laments over a time in his life where he brooded so
much and understood so little.
Writers
understand that some of what contributes to any struggle is other
people who misunderstand them. Writers, Vietnam veterans, and
Average Joes alike have all experienced some degree of “shit”(the
struggles of life itself). The only thing that stands in the way of
people understanding each-other is ignorance, which writers hope to
reduce in their audience.
