Courage is like an inheritance. True. We keep it locked up inside until those crucial moments where life demands more from us than we are typically used to. Aside from all this, fear is pint up inside in a similar way. It leaks out of people almost simultaneously with courage. Also true.
O'Brien wanted us to feel his guilt, his fear, his so-called cowardice. He uses what I believe is an antithesis on page 38 when saying that "certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons;" clearly he understood there was no certainty in the Vietnam War, or any war for that matter.
I thought the gross descriptions of the pig "Declotter" job built up to the parallelism of O'Brien's paralyzing choice towards "slaughtery" if he chose to accept the draft notice on page 41. We feel his frustration with his home town as he fears being judged, so he condemns them by saying, "They didn't know history..." (page 43). By combing all of the townspeople into a common pronoun "them," O'Brien uses a synecdoche to say that the people as a group are against him.
If I can clearly recall back to sophomore year, one of the stages in the hero cycle was flight. This is exactly the approach O'Brien took when he received the draft notice, until he came across the "hero of his life," Elroy Berdahl (pages 44-45). Berdahl taught him with few words in six days that absence of fear does not make one strong, for the only conclusion O'Brien left us with at the end of the chapter was that he "would not be brave." He let embarrassment of having to face all the people in his life make the decision for him to submit himself into the war. How often are we too pressured into a route we're not too fond of due to the driving force of peer pressure. Leaving us with a paradox, O'Brien tells us of his drive home, "... and then to Vietnam, where [he] was a soldier, and then home again. [He] survived but it's not a happy ending. [He] was a coward. [He] went to war" (page 58). 'Coward' and 'war' just don't mix in my mind.
Wow Claire! You blew me away with how many literary terms you incorporated in this blog. I agree with how you said that the words coward and war don't mix in your mind. They don't in mine either which was why I found this sentence conflicting. I think that those words would normally be understood as antithetical thoughts. Anyways, I really liked how you brought up the hero cycle! I hadn't thought to apply it here, but it was definitely clever. It brought me back to sophomore year. And Gilgamesh... those were the days huh?
ReplyDeleteGilgamesh! Enkidu! Those WERE the days!
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