O'Brian breaks the mould of the war story genre with his series of short stories collected in "The Things They Carried". His retelling of his traumatic war experiences along with the less horrific parts of the war side by side gives the reader a stark contrast as well as tells a little bit more of the whole story. As O'Brian states in the opening of "Spin":
"The war wasn't all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet"
He then goes on to describe how some of his platoon mates would play checkers or stare at the sky and just wonder about it all. He said it was a boring war, one second you'd be sitting there bored out of your mind, the next your "balls would jump into your throat" when gunshots erupted just behind you. All of these "sweet" moments work to break the war story genre which "The Things They Carried" is forced into.
Foucault talks about "a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes[...]". O'Brian's war stories, in the case of the operating table, I believe would prove to be inoperable. One would be unable to dissect the stories into different sections for memoir, war story, or even to root out the small amount of fiction sprinkled over the top as shown at the close of "Good Form" when O'Brian says:
"But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt [...] faceless responsibility and faceless grief. [...] What stories can do, I guess, is make things present."
1 comment:
I agree with Kasey in how he says that these stories are difficult to split up and rearrange. I feel that this especially holds true as the three stories often reference one another.
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