Challenging Genre and Making Chandler Happy

The title of the Genre itself, war stories, brings with it certain preconceived notions. By and large there are certain things the audience gets themselves ready for, or perhaps get excited about, when sitting down to read a war story. Those elements include violence, to say the least, and often also include things like blood, guns, aircraft, face paint, binoculars, floppy boonie hats, grenades, premature death, descents into madness, and cute native women.
We, the audience, know this because each of these things are in just about everything we’ve ever been handed that has been called a war story. So we know it’s a war story because it is similar to other things we’ve been told to call war stories. This type of habitual inclusion results in the “passive consumption of generic texts” and continually feeds the “traditional Romantic perspective, [representing genres] as constraining and inhibiting authorial creativity. Thus to explore Chandler’s rhetoric it is much more valuable to focus on what is different about a work of prose that is still included in a particular theme. It is more valuable because that which is included in a genre but is not a slave to the culmination of it’s expectations thereby challenges the genre by not conforming completely but still insisting that it be part of it.
This in turn is important to any schema because to put too fine a point on any classification eventually leads to absurdity. All to often it is that absurdity that leads to confusion, when the entire point of the classification in the first place was to reduce confusion. If we overspecialize we run the risk of creating groups defined by ridiculous minutia like those that “[have] just broken the water pitcher”.
The thing I found most likely to satisfy Chandler in this small collection of war stories was the sympathy O’Brien built for the enemy. It’s not that this has never been done before so much as it’s the way it was done. The writer chose to flash back and depict a much richer life of the enemy than is typical for the traditional war story. Someone once said that history books are written by the winners in order to allude to the spin that may have been placed on the details. It is often similar with war stories. Whatever side the writer wants us to be on or root for sufficient time must be taken demonizing the other side. Sometimes the good guys are the good guys only because and not until the bad guys are the bad guys.
So how do we do this in an unconventional way that challenges the genre? O’Brien starts with humor. In “Spin” he wastes no time in humanizing the enemy with a small anecdote of children and chocolate and then spares no time in slapping us back to reality with “One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.”
In “The Man I Killed” there is challenge on equal par. Dealing with maddening grief is nothing new for the war story, modern or traditional, but detailing the life of a young enemy soldier to the point of making him the victim is not common. O’Brien even goes so far as to establish the idea that this boy was never cut out to be a soldier with details like “his wrists were the wrists of a child.”