Essay 1 Fiction rough draft

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.