Post Two - Working Within Genres

In the three stories "Spin", "The man I Killed", and "Good Form" O' Brien is retelling some of his experiences in war. This would typically place his pieces into the genre of war stories. Universally this would suggest that there was going to be a lot of blood and gore, blowing up and shooting, and usually some form of a hero who saves his whole platoon or at least his best friend. Somewhere along the way someone dies and the narrator finds a hidden truth or has an epiphany about some aspect of his own life or personality that he was blind to before. However, in these three short pieces by O' Brien there isn't much of any of those expected characteristics. He does briefly touch on some of the blood and gore, and quickly discusses some of the shooting or bombs, but mostly he is speaking of remembering the war and how it affects him now remembering it in a way that it didn't affect him then when he was experiencing it. In the end of "Spin" O' Brien writes "Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever." Here is an example of how O' Brien breaks the war story genre of just guns and death and breaks into his discussion of something that happened once being able to live forever through the story he was telling at that time. His more characteristic parts are like the part in "The Man I Killed" when he wrote, "His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull..." This is the war story cliches that people want to read or see. In Chandler's second part of his readings he says, "Genre provides an important frame of reference which helps readers to identify, select and interpret texts." However in the case, by assuming that these pieces by O' Brien are in the genre of war stories, it could take away from the actual purpose the writer may have had because we are limiting its purpose by placing it in a certain genre. Foucault says, "Each of these strange categories can be assigned a precise meaning and a demonstrable content; some of them do certainly involve fantastic entities - fabulous animals or sirens - but, precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopaedia localizes their powers of contagion." I think what he is saying is that while certain pieces do have like characteristics or similarities by putting them into categories like genres it limits the power or purpose they could possibly have.