1. There is an epigraph at the beginning of the text. What is an epigraph? How do writers use them? This epigraph is a citation from John Ransom's Andersonville Diary. Who was he? What was Andersonville? Who "wrote" or "edited" the Diary? Given what you discover about the epigraph and what it introduces, what do you think it accomplishes?
2. "On the Rainy River" questions the American war in Vietnam (40), referring to a series of names and places. Look them up. What was the USS Maddox? Where is the Gulf of Tonkin and what is its relationship to the Vietnamese War? Who was Ho Chi Minh? What was SEATO? What were the Geneva Accords? What was the Cold War and why are dominoes mentioned?
3. Compare the "things" the soldiers carried in Vietnam to the "things" soldiers are carrying in Iraq, both standard issue and personal objects.
4. At the end of "On the Rainy River," the narrator makes a kind of confession: "The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war" (61). What does this mean?
5. According to Mitchell Sanders, "What you have to do...is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself" (106). What is "metafiction"? Why might someone call this book metafiction? See this web site about O'Brien for more information: http://illyria.com/tobsites.html
6. Are there any clues about what O'Brien thinks of his narrator? What should the reader think of him?
7. One of the web sites treating O'Brien and his books leads to a site about magical realism. What is magical realism? Here's the site: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/magreal.htm. Find other examples of magical realism in the novel.
8. Tim O'Brien once made the following assertion in an interview with Texas Monthly: "Good movies -- and good novels, too -- do not depend upon 'accurate portrayals.' Accuracy is irrelevant. Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape; finally makes us look inward at ourselves." (Texas Monthly, Nov. 2002. Qtd. In http://illyria.com/tobhp.html#Newsletter )
What is an "accurate portrayal?" How does The Things They Carried function as art? Does it provide "accurate portrayals?" Of what?
9. Try taking any two chapters (or just Chapter 1 or just Chapter 3) and find all the metaphors and similes that O'Brien uses. List them and discuss how they work.
10. In the set of review snippets on the front pages of our paperback edition of the book, the one from The New Yorker says that "...events are recalled and retold again and again, giving us a deep sense of the fluidity of truth and the dance of memory." What does this comment refer to? Are there examples in the text that gave rise to it? What makes truth fluid? And how can memories dance?
11. O'Brien talks about courage in a range of ways. Discuss.
12. Compare Hemingway's war stories to O'Brien's. (For instance, in his collection In Our Time, which surely inspired "On the Rainy River"). Do O'Brien's characters exemplify Hemingway's definition of "guts" as "grace under pressure"? Hemingway also writes, "in modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason." Is the Vietnam War experience different from that of WWII?
13. "Stories are for joining the past to the future" (38). Is this statement true? Can "stories" affect the future?
14. "Love" is the title of an entire chapter. Are there other treatments of love in the work?
15. In "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," what happens to Mary Anne Bell? (89).
16. What is the form that the chapter "Good Form" talks about? (179).
17. What do the following sentences mean? "I want you to know what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (179).
18. How can the narrator answer his daughter's question in both the ways he speaks of in "Good Form" and be honest?
19. Using O'Brien's The Things They Carried as a model, what is the weight of the things students carry?
20. Where are soldiers of color in this narrative vs. where were they in real life in the Vietnam War?
21. O'Brien makes intertextual references to Brigadoon, Barbarella, and The Man That Never Was. What is intertextuality? In what way do these references add to the fabric of the novel?
22. What is the legacy of Vietnam for America today?
23. Is it possible to "win" a war? Are there any victors?
No comments:
Post a Comment