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... about the field that night. Something about the way Kiowa disappeared into the crud. You were there...
You can tell it. " (The Things They Carried). Two years after O'Brien received that letter, Norman Bowker took his own life. He hung himself with a jump rope inside the locker room at the YMCA after playing an eight hour long game of basketball. He left no suicide note, but Tim O'Brien knew why he did it. In "Notes", O'Brien talks about why he decided to write about Bowker. "Now, a decade after his death, I'm hoping that [Speaking of Silence] this makes good on Norman Bowker's silence. And I hope it's a better story.
Although the old structure remains [of the first copy of his novel], the piece has been substantially revised, in some places by severe cutting, in other places by the addition of new material. Norman is back in the story, where he appears, and I don't think that he would mind that his real name appears. " Norman Bowker was a major influence on Tim O'Brien. After the death of one of their fellow soldiers, named Kiowa, Bowker helped show O'Brien that it was okay to grieve. It's very hard to understand, though, what was going through Bowker's' head. As his said in one of his letters, people don't understand until they actually live through something like that, and he doesn't expect them to try to O'Brien's writing methods have been compared to the writing styles of Melville, Crane, Whitman, and Hemingway. One of his most effective techniques is the use of repetition.
He used this method when he described the body of the "His jaw was in his throat. His upper lip and teeth were gone. His one eye was shut, and his other eye was a star shaped hole. His jaw was in his throat.
The trail junction was shaded by a row of trees and tall brush. The slim young man lay with his legs in the shade. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, and the other was a star shaped hole. " (The Things They Carried). Another main influence on his writing was the man that he killed. One day his daughter asked him, "Daddy, have you ever killed anybody?" , and that brought back a lot of old memories.
The incident bothered him a lot, and although he didn't have nightmares about it, the way that Bowker did, he still Tim O'Brien considers himself a dreamer, as Siegfried Sassoon said, "soldiers are dreamers." Though O'Brien writes from what he sees around him, he tries to challenge himself to just "reflect" upon those experiences, and try to make some kind of sense, and what it means to him. In a Publishers Weekly interview with Michael Coffey, O'Brien tried to communicate to people what his writing meant to him. He said: "To write 'good's tories stories, it requires a sense of passion, and my passion as a human being and as a writer intersect in Vietnam, not in the physical stuff but in the issues of Vietnam. Of courage, rectitude, enlightenment, holiness, trying to do the right He also said: "It's kind of a semantic game: lying versus telling the truth. One doesn't lie for the sake of lying; one does not invent merely for the sake of inventing.
One does it for a particular purpose and that purpose is to arrive at some kind of spiritual truth that one can't discover simply by recording the world as-it-is. We " re inventing and using imagination for sublime reasons. To get at the essence of things, not merely the surface. " In his novel, Going After Cacciato, O'Brien tells the story of a man, named Cacciato (which in Italian, means "the pursued") who decides that he will not fight in Vietnam, and leaves from South East Asia to walk to Paris. He never ends up making it to Paris, as he is caught near the Laotian border by the search party that was sent out to find him.
Berlin (the character that- O'Brien created on behalf of Bowker) is also in Cacciato and his imagination is full of beautiful women, the wonder of exploring the world, and death. Going After Cacciato has a theme relating to how when O'Brien first learned that he was going to be fighting in Vietnam, and he was wondering if he should flee to Canada. It was a temptation that he didn't think he could resist. Cacciato, in the story, did not resist that temptation.
He decided to leave his "C" Company, and he ended up being caught. O'Brien's experience at the "Tip Top Lodge", which was located about 15 yards away from Canada influenced him enough to write about it, and to also include "Paul Berlin." It was written about his friend, Norman Bowker, and himself. It also shed some light into what a soldier may have been thinking while they were in the middle of combat. Critics compared his writing style in If I Die In a Combat Zone to the writing style of Melville, Crane, Whitman, and Hemingway. Things They Carried was universally acclaimed as the most powerful fiction to come out of the Vietnam experience. It won a National Magazine award.
It also won the Heartland Award of the Chicago Tribune, and was also one of the finalists Tim O'Brien has also been called "the best writer of his generation", because his writing style is easy to relate to. In the words of one reviewer, unknown author, "his approach is to use clear, simple words, and reflect the clear values of his midwestern upbringing. " In closing, Tim O'Brien not only had influences that he gained from being in Vietnam during the conflict. The people that he was once able to call his friends were turning into people that he felt he hardly knew. He was fighting for a cause that he knew he was strongly against. He took the life from a man, and that influenced him in a way that would be very hard for anybody to In The Things They Carried there was a passage about a little baby water-buffalo. One soldier, nicknamed Rat Kiley just went crazy on the poor animal, shooting it all over it's body.
It was barely clinging to life, and he shot People who read the book, such as one elderly woman, said things like- "the poor little baby water buffalo, how sad." But O'Brien just would sit there, and look at them as if they were the crazy ones. There was a hidden meaning behind the baby water buffalo. He never once even saw a water buffalo, be it a small one or a large one. The water buffalo symbolized innocence in a time of insanity. It was all about the meaning of war, how people don't care what happens, it's all out of control, and how it can change the mind structure of a person who is the closest thing to normal that you could ever imagine.
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