The Things They Carried Literature and Writing Quotes Page 2
Citations follow this format: (Story Title.Paragraph)
| Quote #4 "The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened." (Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.114) |
Mitchell Sanders is accusing Rat Kiley of making too many digressions, and of course, that's a sin that Tim O'Brien is completely guilty of. Not only does the book as a whole not flow as a story, but Tim is constantly jumping into the middle of stories, jerking the tone around and showing us that war is the antithesis of consistency. Nonetheless, the point is made – literary technique matters to O'Brien, and he's telling us here that it's something we should notice too.
| Quote #5 I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don't. yet when I received Norman Bowker's letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. (Notes.11) |
Tim's aversion to therapy here is kind of interesting. If writing helped him process his memories in a certain way, doesn't that count as therapy? Not the sit-on-a-comfy-couch, talk-about-your-feelings kind of therapy, but therapy nonetheless? Regardless, the ability to communicate his war experiences through stories has helped Tim avoid the PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and other homecoming issues that his comrades are still going through.
| Quote #6 To provide a dramatic frame, I collapsed events into a single time and place, a car circling a lake on a quiet afternoon in midsummer, using the lake as a nucleus around which the story would orbit. As he'd requested, I did not use Norman Bowker's name, instead substituting the name of my novel's main character, Paul Berlin. For the scenery I borrowed heavily from my own hometown. Wholesale thievery, in fact. […] Almost immediately, though, there was a sense of failure. The details of Norman Bowker's story were missing. In this original version, which I still conceived as part of the novel, I had been forced to omit the shit field and the rain and the death of Kiowa, replacing material with events that better fit the book's narrative. As a consequence I'd lost the natural counterpoint between the lake and the field. A metaphoric unity was broken. (Notes.12-14) |
Here we learn that while the humor, violence, swearing, and everything makes O'Brien a lot more fun to read than, say, Hawthorne, he's nonetheless a Writer with a capital W. He uses terms like "dramatic frames" and "metaphoric unity" when he describes how he writes his story-truths. And this, dear readers, means that he's got to be using symbolism up the wazoo. Stop on by "Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory" to see how.
