The Things they Carried

 In small groups, address the questions below and post a comment for your group.  Be sure to list all the names of the people in your group for credit.

1. "Love," "Spin" "On the Rainy River"

Some Issues for this reading selection –


1. Short interlude pieces – what are they for? Examine titles
2. "Keep Your Eye On…" (characters Bowker, Azar) What do we learn about them?
3. "Spin" – moments of quiet; if this were music it would be meditative in tone.
"That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." (O'Brien 40)
For Tuesday:
4. "On the Rainy River" – let go of clichés of soldiers – what’s the "right thing to do" for Tim? Kill/die because he was embarrassed not to --
5. Introduction of fictional aspect of novel – "hallucinations" at the river.


6.  Read the following and discuss the postmodern elements in the readings so far.

Postmodernism	The term postmodernism implies a movement away from and perhaps a reaction against modernism. Both terms are often used to describe a broad spectrum of attitudes and broad approaches to the novel.
Some Definitions of Terms
In general premodernism assumes that man is ruled by authority (e.g., the Catholic Church) and tradition. With modernism, influenced by humanism and the Enlightenment, man rejects tradition and authority in favor of a reliance on reason and on scientific discovery. Postmodernism stretches and breaks away from the idea that man can achieve understanding through a reliance on reason and science.
Discoveries such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle, and the weird behavior of particles in quantum physics convey the belief that the universe cannot be explained by reason alone.
Modernism, with its belief in the primacy of human reason, values realism in fiction and logical narrative structures. Mary Klage says: Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better [i.e., the more rationally]. . .it will function.
In Modernist Fiction Randall Stevenson says: Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it.
Characteristics of Postmodernism in Fiction
Postmodernist fiction is generally marked by one or more of the following characteristics: playfulness with language experimentation in the form of the novel less reliance on traditional narrative form less reliance on traditional character development experimentation with point of view experimentation with the way time is conveyed in the novel mixture of "high art" and popular culture interest in metafiction, that is, fiction about the nature of fiction

Metafiction:
Metafiction is a type of fiction that self-consciously addresses the devices of fiction, exposing the fictional illusion. It is the literary term describing fictional writing that self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction does not let the reader forget he or she is reading a fictional work.

Metafiction is primarily associated with Modernist and Postmodernist literature, but is found at least as early as the 9th-century One Thousand and One Nights and Chaucer's 14th-century Canterbury Tales. Cervantes' Don Quixote is a metafictional novel, as is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). In the 1950s several French novelists published works whose styles were collectively dubbed "nouveau roman". These "new novels" were characterized by their bending of genre and style and often included elements of metafiction. It became prominent in the 1960s, with authors and works such as John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Robert Coover's The Babysitter and The Magic Poker, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and William H. Gass's Willie Master's Lonesome Wife. William H. Gass coined the term “metafiction” in a 1970 essay entitled “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction”. Unlike the antinovel, or anti-fiction, metafiction is specifically fiction about fiction, i.e. fiction which self-consciously reflects upon itself.

Questions for discussion:

Why is the first story told in the third person? What effect does it have on you as a reader to then switch to the first person in “Love”? O’Brien also uses the second person in this collection. For example, in “On the Rainy River,” the narrator, trying to decide whether to accept the draft or become a draft dodger, asks: “What would you do?” (page 56). Why does the author use these different perspectives?

Who is Elroy Bendahl, and why is he “the hero of [the narrator’s] life” (page 48)?


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?


Here is the website for The Big Read with lots of interesting information and a 28 minute radio interview with Tim O'Brien:
www.neabigread.org/books/thethingstheycarried/radioshow.php