Post 2: Working Within Genres

In O'Brien's Spin, The Man I killed, and Good Form, he is reminiscing about his experiences in war, thus the genre of the War story. In Chandler's piece, he states that "From the traditional romantic perspective, genres are seen as constraining and inhibiting authorial creativity. However contemporary theorists, even within literary studies, typically reject this view (e.g.Fowler 1982: 31). Gledhill notes that one perspective on this issue is that some of those who write within a genre work in creative 'tension' with the conventions, attempting a personal inflection of them (Gledhill 1985: 63). This is evident in O'Brien's The Man I Killed where he attempts to romanticize the life of the man he killed. In my opinion this undermines what my understanding is of the War story genre. It's similar to the Western Genre in that there is the good guy/bad guy, and in war genre there is the hero and the enemy. The bad guy/enemy dies, the good guy/hero lives. O'Brien was unable to desensitize himself from the the realities of war. His feeling of guilt brought him to romanticize his enemy's life to help him cope. "He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe...where his parents farmed...he was not a communist. He was a citizen and a soldier...patriotic resistance had the force of tradition...that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and privilege." O'Brien is the reluctant hero as his buddy Azar congratulates him on "the kill".

In Spin, O'Brien's reminiscing about the war is summed up in the statement "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:" Here there is no cohesiveness to the story, leaving the reader in limbo. However, in Chandler's piece, it states that "We may derive pleasure from observing how the conventions of the genre are manipulated (Abercrombie 1996: 45). We may also enjoy the stretching of a genre in new directions and the consequent shifting of our expectations.