Wednesday, February 28, 2018

The Man I Killed

AGENDA:

"O’Brien illustrates the ambiguity and complexity of Vietnam by alternating explicit references to beauty and gore. The butterfly and the tiny blue flowers he mentions show the mystery and suddenness of death in the face of pristine natural phenomena. O’Brien’s observations of his victim lying on the side of the road—his jaw in his throat and his upper lip gone—emphasize the unnaturalness of war amid nature. The contrast of images is an incredibly ironic one that suggests the tragedy of death amid so much beauty. However, the presence of the butterfly and the tiny blue flowers also suggests that life goes on even despite such unspeakable tragedy. After O’Brien killed the Vietnamese soldier, the flowers didn’t shrivel up, and the butterfly didn’t fly away. They stayed and found their home around the tragedy. In this way, like the STORY of Curt Lemon’s death, “The Man I Killed” is a story about the beauty of life rather than the gruesomeness of death."

Find contrasting images of beauty and gore in the chapter.  Do you agree with this analysis?
 Where else in the novel do you find images of the beauty of life contrasted with the gruesomeness of death?

Post comment.
Contniue to work on your story.

HMWK:  Read "Speaking of Courage" and "Notes" to pg. 162

Monday, February 26, 2018

Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong

AGENDA:

See previous post.  Answer Level 2 and 3 questions in the comment section.

View Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong..
Work on short stories.

HMWK:  Read "Stockings"  "Church"  "The Man I Killed" (read to page 136)

Thursday, February 15, 2018

The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

 AGENDA:

Read "Churches" and "Style"

Work on Short Stories


Over the Break Read "The Dentist" and "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"--to pg. 116

When we return we will view A Soldier's Sweetheart
http://blip.tv/lostin24/a-soldier-s-sweetheart-part-1-of-3-2467255

https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=A0LEVv7N8tBYtlIAI7APxQt.?p=a+soldiers+sweetheart&fr=yhs-pty-pty_extension&fr2=piv-web&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_extension#id=1&vid=0f062ddcbb987838ff9f93ab90bd8759&action=view 

Magic Realism and The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong


Magic Realism


"My most important problem was destroying
the lines of demarcation that separates what
seems real from what seems fantastic"
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A narrative technique that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. It is characterized by an equal acceptance of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Magic realism fuses (1) lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with (2) an examination of the character of human existence and (3) an implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite. 

 Characteristics of Magical Realism 
Hybridity—Magical realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature.  Specifically, magical realism is illustrated in the inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous.  The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change.  Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism:  a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate. 
Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective—The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly respect the magic, or else the magic dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split from the real instead of synchronized with it.  The term "magic" relates to the fact that the point of view that the text depicts explicitly is not adopted according to the implied world view of the author.  As Gonzales Echevarria expresses, the act of distancing oneself from the beliefs held by a certain social group makes it impossible to be thought of as a representative of that society. 
Authorial Reticence—Authorial reticence refers to the lack of clear opinions about the accuracy of events and the credibility of the world views expressed by the characters in the text.  This technique promotes acceptance in magical realism.  In magical realism, the simple act of explaining the supernatural would eradicate its position of equality regarding a person’s conventional view of reality.  Because it would then be less valid, the supernatural world would be discarded as false testimony. 
The Supernatural and Natural—In magical realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable.  While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.
english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html 


DISCUSSION GROUPS:
HMWK: POST A COMMENT TO THE INTERPRETIVE QUESTIONS Level 2 and  Allegorical/Symbolic Question Level 3

"The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong"

Level 2:  Interpretive questions.
In "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," what transforms Mary Anne into a predatory killer? Does it matter that Mary Anne is a woman? How so? What does the story tell us about the nature of the Vietnam War?  

2. The story Rat tells in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is highly fantastical. Does its lack of believability make it any less compelling? Do you believe it? Does it fit O'Brien's criteria for a true war story? 
 



3.  Find three symbols in this chapter and explain them.
4.  Find three specific quotes and scenes from the chapter that illustrate Mary Anne’s change.  Also, explain Mary Anne’s transformation.  Does she go crazy?  Or does she simply change?


5.  Explain the whole “cave scene”.  What is going on?  What has Mary Anne become?  Make a list of all of graphic imagery from that scene.
6. Does it matter what happened, in the end, to Mary Anne? Would this be a better story if we knew, precisely, what happened to her after she left camp? Or does this vague ending add to the story? Either way, why?

Level 3 Allegorical/Symbolic Questions   What does this short story tell the reader about the nature of humanity?  About war?

Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Writing assignment--Things They Carried

WRITING:Begin working on a nonlinear narrative assignment:


Your assignment:

Write a short story of at least 5 pages that:

1. Has a historical background of your choice--

2. Explores multiple narrative lines--present/past--flashback stories within a story.


3. Uses a traditional 1st or 3rd person narrative but breaks it up with intertextuality and metafiction:
  a. Evidence paragraphs or sections--quotes, interviews, newspaper clippings, historical facts, etc.  
  b. Hypotheses sections--places where you as a writer question what you've written or possible endings

How to Tell a True War Story

AGENDA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4kA47odT8g

Respond to the questions for "How to Tell a True War Story".  Post a comment.

How to Tell a True War Story

 Videos
Platoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPi8EQzJ2Bg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKpQB3bEPbI&list=TLpkj93aMlKiM 

Tim O'Brien:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C48fWkljK28 

http://prezi.com/i7pnwqaf45c2/the-things-they-carried-lesson-plan/ 


Read over the following summaries and analysis of "How to Tell a True War Story."  Then discuss with your group the key questions posted in red.  As a group find passages in the story that show the distinction between "happening truth" and "story truth".  Post a group comment reflecting the key points of your discussion and passages you may want to refer to later in your paper.  Why are ambiguity and paradox so important to the telling of these stories about the Vietnam War?




Memory and Reminiscence

Because ‘‘How to Tell a True War Story’’ is written by a Vietnam War veteran, and because Tim O’Brien has chosen to create a narrator with the same name as his own, most readers want to believe that the stories O’Brien tells are true and actually happened to him. There are several reasons for this. In the first place, O’Brien’s so-called memoir, If I Die In a Combat Zone, contains many stories that find their way into his later novels and short fiction. Thus, it is difficult for the reader to sort through what is memory and what is fiction.
There are those, however, who would suggest that this is one of O’Brien’s points in writing his stories. Although most readers would believe that their own memories are ‘‘true,’’ this particular story sets out to demonstrate the way that memories are at once true and made up.
Further, as O’Brien tells the reader in ‘‘How to Tell a True War Story,’’ ‘‘You’d feel cheated if it never happened.’’ This is certainly one response to O’Brien’s story. Readers want the stories to be true in the sense that they grow out of O’Brien’s memory. O’Brien, however, will not let the reader take this easy way out. Instead, he questions the entire notion of memoir, reminiscence, and the ability of memory to convey the truth.

Truth and Falsehood
Certainly, the most insistent theme in this story is that of truth and falsehood. O’Brien, however, would be unlikely to set up such a dichotomy. That is, according to ‘‘How to Tell a True War Story,’’ truth is not something that can find its opposition in untruth. Rather, according to O’Brien, because war is so ambiguous, truth takes on many guises. Even seemingly contradictory events can both be considered true. O’Brien uses the event of Curt Lemon’s death to make this point. O’Brien knows, for example, that Curt is killed by a rigged 105mm round. However, as the scene replays in his mind, O’Brien sees the event very differently. It seems to him that Curt is killed by the sunlight, and that it is the sunlight that lifts him high into the tree where O’Brien will later have to retrieve Curt’s body parts. Thus O’Brien distinguishes between the truth that happens and the truth that seems to happen.
Moreover, O’Brien likes to play with words and to undermine the logical connection between words. In Western philosophy, it is considered impossible for a word to mean itself and its opposite at the same time. O’Brien demonstrates it may indeed be possible. For example, when he writes, ‘‘it is safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true,’’ he is creating a paradox. If nothing is ever absolutely true, then even that statement cannot be absolutely true. The paradox suggests that while it might be possible to approximate truth, it must be told, as Emily Dickinson once wrote, ‘‘aslant.’’

Perhaps the most disconcerting moment in this tale occurs when O’Brien tells the story of the woman who approaches him after he tells this tale. Most readers assume that O’Brien the author is speaking, and that perhaps he is telling a story of what happened to him after a reading of his fiction. When the woman says she likes the story about the water buffalo, O’Brien is annoyed. Although he does not tell her, he tells the reader that the entire episode did not happen, that it was all made up, and that even the characters are not real.
Readers may be shocked. How could O’Brien have fabricated all of this? Then the reader may realize that O’Brien is playing with the truth again, for if everything in the story is fabricated, then so is the woman who approached him. This play with truth and falsehood provides both delight and despair for the reader who will never be able to determine either truth or falsehood in O’Brien’s stories in the traditional sense. As Stephen Kaplan suggests in Understanding Tim O’Brien, ‘‘[O’Brien] completely destroys the fine line dividing fact from fiction and tries to show . . . that fiction (or the imagined world) can often be truer, especially in the case
of Vietnam, than fact.’’


How to Tell a True War Story: Style
Point of View and Narration

One of the most interesting, and perhaps troubling, aspects of the construction of ‘‘How to Tell a True War Story’’ is O’Brien’s choice to create a fictional, first-person narrator who also carries the name ‘‘Tim O’Brien.’’ Although the narrator remains unnamed in this particular story, other stories in the collection clearly identify the narrator by the name Tim. Further, the other stories in the collection also identify the narrator as a forty-three-yearold writer who writes about the Vietnam War, ever more closely identifying the narrator with the author.
On the one hand, this connection is very compelling. Readers are drawn into the story believing that they are reading something that has some basis in the truth of the writer Tim O’Brien. Further, the authorial voice that links the story fragments together sounds like it ought to belong to the writer.


On the other hand, however, the device allows O’Brien to play with notions of truth and ambiguity. Does the narrator represent the author? Or do the narrator’s words tell the reader not to trust either the story or the teller? What can be said unequivocally about the Vietnam War? O’Brien’s use of the fictional narrator
suggests that there is nothing unequivocal about the war. Rather, it seems that O’Brien, through his narrator Tim, wants the reader to understand that during war, seeming-truth can be as true as happening-truth.
Ought the reader consider the narrator to be unreliable? After all, after pledging the truth of the story from the very first line, he undercuts that claim by telling the reader at the last possible moment that none of the events in the story happened. While this might seem to point to an unreliable narrator, a narrator who cannot find it in himself to tell the truth, it is more likely that O’Brien is making the point that the entire story is true, it just never happened. This distinction, while frustrating for some readers, is an important one not only for the understanding of ‘‘How to Tell a True War Story’’ but also for the reading of The Things They Carried.
 

Structure
‘‘How to Tell a True War Story’’ is not structured in a traditional manner, with a sequential narrative that moves chronologically from start to finish. Rather, O’Brien has chosen to use a number of very short stories within the body of the full story to illustrate or provide examples of commentary provided by the narrator.
That is, the narrator will make some comment about the nature of a ‘‘true’’ war story, then will recount a brief story that illustrates the point. These stories within the larger story are not arranged chronologically.
Consequently, the reader learns gradually, and out of sequence, the events that led to the death of Curt Lemon as well as the events that take place after his death.


This structure serves two purposes. In the first place, the structure allows the story to move back and forth between concrete image and abstract reality. The narrator writes that ‘‘True war stories do not generalize.
They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.’’ Thus, for the narrator to provide ‘‘true’’ war stories, he must provide the concrete illustration. While the stories within the larger story, then, may qualify as ‘‘true’’war stories, the larger story cannot, as it does indulge in abstraction and analysis.

The second purpose served by this back-and forth structure is that it mirrors and reflects the structure of the book The Things They Carried. Just as the story has concrete, image-filled stories within it, so too does the larger book contain chapters that are both concrete and image-filled. Likewise, there are chapters within the book that serve as commentary on the rest of the stories. As a result, ‘‘How to Tell a True War Story’’ provides for the reader a model of how the larger work functions.
The story that results from this metafictional (metafiction is fiction that deals with the writing of fiction or its conventions) structure may seem fragmentary because of the many snippets of the story that find their way into the narrative. However, the metafictional commentary provided by the narrator binds the stories together just as the chapters of the book are bound together by the many linkages O’Brien provides.

Tim O’Brien’s Criteria: 
A true war story is never moral. 
It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. 
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. 
Does not uplift 
No virtue 
Allegiance to obscenity and evil 
Difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen 
Cannot be believed… must be at least skeptical. 
Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t 
You can’t even tell it—it’s beyond telling. 
It never seems to end. 
If there’s a moral, it’s a tiny thread that makes the cloth, you can’t tease it out or find meaning without unraveling deeper meaning. 
You might have no more to say than maybe “oh.” 
Makes the stomach believe 
Does not generalize, abstract, analyze 
Nothing is ever absolutely true. 
Often there is not a point that hits you right away… 
Never about war.
  

Friday, February 9, 2018

Things They Carried/"Ambush"

AGENDA:


http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=tim+O%27brien+things+they+carried&FORM=HDRSC3&adlt=strict#view=detail&mid=8BB7D06A8BE68E16D5218BB7D06A8BE68E16D521



Start at 15:00

From Shmoop

Read "Ambush"


WHY SHOULD I CARE?

The Vietnam War: It's a tough pill to swallow. Maybe you're sick to death of hearing yet another Doors' song in yet another Vietnam War-era movie... or just bummed out by the never-ending stories of relentless carnage.
Or maybe you just feel alienated by the subject matter. You can't really comprehend it. You want to read something that speaks to you.
The Things They Carried is about war, sure. But, first and foremost, it's about a dude named Tim O'Brien struggling with two super-universal issues: communication and memory.
Tim O'Brien saw some horrific stuff, and now he's trying to communicate with a wider audience. And even if you've never been to war or seen anything truly hair-raising, you know what that's like. Have you ever tried to communicate what love/fear/sorrow/getting wasabi up your nose really feels like? And have you ever failed?
We're guessing the answer is yes.
Tim O'Brien lost some beloved people both before and during the war, and now he's trying to remember them with such clarity that they're resurrected. Even if you've never seen anyone die (or killed anyone), you should know what that's like. Have you ever stared at a picture of someone you've loved and lost—a grandmother, a first love, a summer camp buddy—and tried to burn their face into your memory?
We're guessing the answer is yes.
So while you might not be able to comprehend the horrors that Tim O'Brien has seen, you understand in a larger, human way what he's going through. Sure, he's not trying to communicate the feeling of getting wasabi up his nose... he's trying to communicate the feeling of pulling a dead friend's corpse from a lake full of raw sewage. But he's still trying and still failing. And maybe he's not trying to resurrect a summer camp pal... he's trying to resurrect a Vietnamese academic whom he killed. But he's still trying to make that person live again via memory.
What makes The Things They Carried tick is the fact that it manages to be comprehensible and alien all at once. So while you might never understand what war looks like, smells like, or sounds like, The Things They Carried will allow you to (begin to) understand how soldiers feel after returning from war: scarred, but shockingly relatable.

HOMEWORK:   For Tuesday, read "Spin," "Love," and "On the Rainy River.

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

The Things They Carried


AGENDA:
Work on "Nature" essays.

The Things They Carried

AGENDA:
The Things They Carried
Audio--Selected Shorts




 VOCABULARY WORDS: ANAPHORA, EPIGRAPH

"What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty. As a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded. He also carried between 10 and 15 pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders."

"The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among them were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellant, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, and two or three canteens of water."

"They carried the land itself--Vietnam, the place, the soil-powdery-orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity."

"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 specifc gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide...They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing."

* Briefly discuss the differences between "literal" things that the soldiers carried and "figurative" things. What are some "literal" and "figurative" things that people carry with them every day? Post a comment.

1. The narrator of The Things They Carried has the same name as the book's author. How did this affect your response to the book?
 2. In the title story, how do the things the men carry help define them as individuals? What are some of the more interesting items? Which "things" were unexpected? What would you carry if you went to war? 

Monday, February 5, 2018

Nature Essays

AGENDA:

Writing:  Continue to work on and finish nature essays

New book:
Go downstairs to library for The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Thursday, February 1, 2018