Agenda Tues. Sept. 8

Elements of Style quiz

www.docstyles.com/write.htm


Read "Ambush"

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Discussion questions

* Why does the narrator lie to his daughter, and how does he justify it? Do you think she will ask him the same question when she's older? Why/Why not?
* The narrator "keep[s] writing war stories." What does he expect the writing to do? Do you think it is working?
* Why doesn't the narrator let the soldier pass? How do you think you would have reacted in a similar situation?
* Why do you think the narrator focuses on the gory details of the soldier's death?
* Kiowa tells the narrator that it was a "good kill." What does this phrase mean in its military context? Do you agree or disagree with Kiowa's interpretation? Why/Why not?
* How do individuals justify killing during wartime when they would not kill during times of peace? What does this tell you about humans' tendencies toward self-preservation?
* What steps could the narrator take to end his own torment about killing the man? How can we come to grips with the guilt we feel over some of our actions?

HW: Read transcript of President Obama's speech to students. We will discuss his writing strategies.