Assignment #2

We, the audience are so accustomed to these key elements of a war story genre, which include: patriotism, anger, fear, hatred, violence, deadly weapons, massive amounts of blood, death, and innocent victims of war which only lead us to have our own frame of reference, and a conceptual understanding of a war story genre.
I think Tim O’Brien is fully aware of his audiences’ expectations, which ultimately gives him the advantage to add or delete certain popular elements to a war story genre. In Chandler’s piece ‘Working with Genre’ Nicholas Abercrombie focuses more on the pleasure schema of the audience and its relation to a genre. He adds “…audience derive pleasure from the way in which their expectations are finally realized. There may be satisfaction both in finding our inference and predictions to be correct and in being surprised when they are not.”(Chandler, 5) This framework plays a key advantage for O’Brien to slightly break free from a typical war story genre, without entirely losing his audience. In O’Brien’s short story ‘Spin’ he states “On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you can make it dance.” I think of this statement in a larger scope, such as adding additional elements to an ideal war story genre to touch, or perhaps expand his audience. He starts ‘Spin’ by saying “The war wasn’t all terror and violence. Sometimes things could almost get sweet.” My first reaction was “ITS NOT?” In regarding the little boy with a plastic leg and Azar’s comment “One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.” I had to remind my self to stop laughing, it’s somewhat melancholy to think of the little boy, but it wasn’t entirely my fault. If anything, its O’Brien’s fault, for he has added a touch of humor to a war story genre. He has a way of controlling the suspense of the story. He has a way of teasing his audience. He creates a visually disturbing mood when he describes Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree. Then cuts off by saying “But the war wasn’t all that way”, and then mentions something hilarious like Ted Lavender who “…went to heavy on the tranquilizers”, and Ted adds “We got ourselves a nice mellow war today”.
My expectations in regarding an American war story genre is the following: anything that is non-American is No Good for You. In The Man I Killed, O’Brien slips away from a typical American war story genre by allowing the audience to empathize with the enemy. Interestingly enough O’Brien has created a character with a back-story whom we all can empathize with, without even knowing his name.
After reading Good Form, I lost complete trust in O’Brien. It’s like a magician exposing his/her tricks. The segment where he defines the story-truth vs. the happening truth and especially the incident when he witness a man getting killed as a memory of his. Is it a memory of his, or is it just a pigment of his imagination? It felt like I was watching a movie, the climax is heavily build and all of the sudden I can see the third camera in the far left corner of the screen, ultimately causes aesthetic distance, not a good feeling.
Foucault mentions something very interesting in The Order of Things that can justify the illegality of O’Brien’s actions. “Order is, at one and the same time, that which is given in the things as their inner law, the hidden network that determines the way they conform one another, and also that which has no existence except the in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiting in silence for the moment of its expression.”(XX). In the context of war story genre, O’Brien has disrupted the order, by adding new system of elements.