...Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil everything...You feel an intense, out-of-the skin awareness of your living self-your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man...Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost...You are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not (O’Brien 77-78).
This passage by Michael O’Brien is about the beauty, love and goodness of creation and humankind residing in the midst of the death and meaninglessness of war. This passage illuminates the whole book because it shows the paradoxes of what it is like to be a soldier. How can one look at a blade of grass and really see and feel its aliveness when so close to dying? What is it about death that makes someone want to be a better person? A more alive person? Instead of giving up in the face of impending death, the body and the mind fight to live. Not only live, but thrive and love and appreciate the beauty all around. O’Brien shows this throughout “The Things They Carried”. His stories are about contrasting things, such as love and hate, life and death, Atheism and a deep belief in God. O’Brien weaves all of these together in a complicated and mysterious way, for he knows that nothing is merely black and white. As he later writes, “There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery” (O’Brien 78).
When we survive a war, or famine, a tsunami or the death of a child, we can no longer keep our lives in nice, predictable boxes. We will see life as heartbreaking and through this we will also see the beauty intensified.The essence of O’Brien’s stories is that most of us do not realize the value of life until there is suffering; we do not appreciate life until our world is challenged. We recognize the light as light only when it is contrasted with the darkness.
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O'Brien, Tim.
The Things They Carried. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. 77-78. Print.
Autumn
ReplyDeleteGreat post on the passage you chose. I enjoyed the observations you made, on how O’Brien saw how death, sadness and grief is needed in our lives, to make us realize how precious life is. That we sometime need to experience death and the darkness to really see the light. How we can sometimes take a horrible experience and make it a positive experience. It was also an excellent point that you made on how life has shades of grey, that it is not always white or black. If our lives were only happiness and light, we would not truly appreciate and enjoy it to the fullest.
I felt that you did an excellent job on the analysis of this passage.