Blog Response #2

In O’Brien’s three short war stories, he defies the war story archetype by showing the psychological aspect behind killing a man. According to Daniel Chandler in his essay “Introduction To Genre Theory”, “any text requires what is sometimes called 'cultural capital' on the part of its audience to make sense of it.” As per the ‘cultural capital’ of war stories, killing someone would be the absolute necessity of anything remotely like it (as that’s probably the only thing about war stories people find to be interesting), the short story “The Man I Killed” gives the people what they want, but then exploring the shock and absolute remorse felt by the speaker upon killing a man he did not know. O’Brien makes the death of the soldier seem that much more traumatic to the speaker when he is telling the back-story of the deceased: “…he had been a soldier for only a single day. After his years at the university, the man I killed returned with his new wife to the village of My Khe…”

In “Spin”, O’Brien shows what the soldiers do during their downtime. They play checkers, they watch the skies, and do other things that aren’t so war like. This strays quite far your typical war story. As Michael Focault says in the Prefaces of “The Order of Things”: “We are all familiar with the disconcerting effects of… the sudden vicinity of things that have no relation to each other…” which can describe how people would not want to read a war story without the actual war with guns-a-blazing and a chopper to get to. Does this excerpt sound like something out of Platoon or Saving Private Ryan? “…Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, “Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today.” I really don’t think so. O’Brien’s three stories all defy what may seem like some sort of adventurous, epic story. They simply read and feel more like a series of survival stories, as it seems like the stories were written to show how they soldiers got by day to day, not so much how they fought in a war.