Response to Jim Nielson's Essay

In response to this article, I believe that Jim Neilson’s argument is that by writing in the postmodern fashion, Tim O’Brien focuses only on his side of the Vietnam War, and completely ignores the historical facts. For example, Nielson writes that, “In postmodern fashion, The Things They Carried focuses on literary and epistemological preoccupations at the expense both of a Vietnamese perspective and of any broader historical/political understanding.” And, “In this essay I will show that Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried accords with much of the anti-totalizing strains of postmodernism, and I will argue that it is precisely this tendency in his fiction that makes it incapable of opposing the ongoing reconstruction of the war as an American tragedy.” These quotes show that Neilson was too focused on the representation of truth and accounts for what actually happened globally and didn’t necessarily care for the dramatic story of the soldiers fighting everyday to stay alive. I believe that Neilson criticizes O’Brien way too much in this piece because O’Brien is writing his book in his perspective because he is accounting for everything that happened to him and his platoon. Neilson is upset because it doesn’t truly represent an actual account of the Vietnam War, but the thing is this is O’Brien’s personal and real account and the fact is you cannot even compare this novel to a historical account because of the fact that human embellishment, lack of complete understanding, and ignorance will all get in the way of the truth at times. Also Neilson gets jealous of the praise that this novel has received when he says, “Critics and reviewers have lavished much praise upon O'Brien, often asserting that his fiction captures something essential about the nature of the Vietnam War.” I believe that this jealousy comes from the fact that he doesn’t have an amazing story to tell like O’Brien does.

The Things They Carried Themes

Well I’m glad we discussed this on Friday so that I have a better understanding of what I think the main theme is. So far from reading the book and from what we have discussed in class I would have to say that the predominant theme is silence. This is an interesting theme for a novel that is about the Vietnam War because it was far from silent on both the frontlines and the home front. This theme is so apparent because of the fact that all of the chapters or short stories correlate to some deeper meaning that has to do with silence. An example would be when the author talks about how "[He] was a coward. [He] went to the war" (61). This ties into silence because he was a coward and didn’t have the courage to get out of going; therefore he was silent in his actions.
Moving away from the “silence” theme, I think there may be another theme that sneaks itself into the book somewhere. This is just a complete guess and I have nothing in the story to base the guess off of yet but I have a feeling that some postmodern ideal will jump into the equation sooner or later because it has so far in every other book that we have read this year.
Just as far as my ideas concerning this book, right now I would say that this is my favorite one that we have read this year because it’s a bunch of war stories about the Vietnam War. Particularly I don’t like reading besides reading my Bible but if I have to read I want to read about something I might actually care about and so far this book is pretty good. I hope it continues to get better as well as our class discussions!

Summing Up Postmodernism

It’s kind of hard to sum up all the things we have learned about Postmodernism this year because it’s so complicated and unusual to people not familiar to it. Basically what I have learned most about Postmodernism this semester is the fact that it is not an easy term to understand. Whenever we had a class discussion or activity dealing with Postmodernism I knew that I really had to pay attention otherwise my brain would, “be scrambled like fried eggs.” (Drew Gregory). Seriously though I believe the most interesting thing I learned about Postmodernism was the fact that believers see the world as a collection of cultures and the variety in cultures create many differences and believers think that this uniqueness is a thing of beauty. Going along with that is the Postmodernistic belief of the collection of narratives. These connect because of the fact that difference makes them great.

There has been a Postmodernist theme in all of the books we have read this semester, but not all were as vivid and clear as others. Cat’s Cradle seemed to be the easiest for me to depict the postmodernist ideals because of the fact that the book was based on the religion Bokononism; the religion based on lies. This caught my eye because it coexists with the belief of postmodernism that says each person’s truth is different, meaning that each outcome that we choose will be different than someone else’s due to the difference in our surroundings, our choices, and our experiences and this is why each person’s “truth” will vary.

After looking back, I have had a good time this semester trying to understand all of these unusual concepts and ideals. The one thing I hope though is that I can actually understand this mess of strange ideals before we graduate!!!!!!

Bokononism

Cat’s Cradle is a very interesting book so far, and not only the content of the book, but even the layout of the chapters. The fact that each chapter is so short relates with the theory of postmodernism because of what we already talked about in class, which was the fact that society today is so unfocused that the author decided to make each chapter like an episode in a television series. This I believe is a very true statement because of the fact that at least for me it’s really hard to sit down and read a book and get everything it has to say. The way this book is written I believe will be a huge factor in my desire to reading it.
Now the deeper stuff. So far from what I’ve read I find it really weird how the story starts off by introducing this strange so called religion called Bokononism. The author describes this religion by saying, “We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a Karass.” These Karasses were filled with random people that usually didn’t even ever meet. Just as it says in the “Fifty-third Calypso” written by Bokonon, “Oh a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park, and a lion-hunter in the jungle dark, and a Chinese dentist and a British queen—All fit together in the same machine,” This verifies that anyone anywhere on Earth can be a part of a certain Karass. I’m not sure what exactly to think about all of this yet, but as far as the religion part of it goes I think this is whack and I don’t understand how or why the author would convert from Christianity to “the religion of lies”, but I hope this will be discussed in further reading.

Thesis

Alright for this blog we are supposed to elaborate on what ideas we have for our thesis statement on our upcoming essay. I’m going to be honest and say that I have not gotten very far in this book yet, but I am catching up I think. After saying this though, I would have to say that I would write my thesis statement on one of the most controversial issues in our class discussions: “Is our society today closer to the lives of the ‘savages’ or the lifestyle of what are considered normal people in the novel?” Of course this thesis isn’t final and maybe some other issues will arise and I will want confront one of them instead, but I have a feeling that most of the class will address this issue at some point in their essay.

The Dartmouth Writing Program website helped me to understand that writing a thesis is not all about taking a side and going from there, but instead to, “develop an interesting perspective that you can support and defend. This perspective must be more than an observation.” After reading this I noticed that this had been a problem in the past for me, but I think I have incorporated this idea into my thesis above.

Some other books I will probably include in my essay will be the Bible and 1984. So far this book has gone against many of my strong beliefs and I would really enjoy finding the true answers that I do not already know from the Bible. Also, this may help me out more in class discussions. But seriously I think insights from the Bible will enormously help my point of view on where we stand today as a society compared to the savages and the people from London. Another book I may end up using is 1984. I plan on using this book to compare and contrast the similarities and differences from these two novels.

i finally made one!

Alright well I’m new to this blogging thing but here goes…

Why do cultures create narratives/myths? I believe cultures in the past used myths to explain events of their time, and what’s strange is that what we call a myth today was most likely considered factual in that time period. Anyways people then did not have any other way of proving a story to be true. Ancient tribes also created stories about their gods and how they received their power. This is an example of how their culture and beliefs were passed on and on. A negative example of this in Brave New World would be in the decanting room in chapter 2. “They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers” (Huxley 22). Now books and flowers may not be a very big deal to some of the babies but my point is that designing a human being to like and dislike things by force is not passing on beliefs but insisting them on everyone.

Postmodernism talks about Grand Narratives and what they really are. Basically what I understand a grand narrative to be is a large story that is made up and can account for a group of shorter narratives. A grand narrative can lead to oppression like in 1984 when it gives examples of the Soviet Union’s government and how they took control the people. This destroys the ideas of the minorities because they are too scared to supersede the authority of the government.

The novel can be a warning to our society today because it classifies savages as what we would most likely call normal people today in our society, and normal fathers and mothers savages. This is outrageous and way out of hand and I believe that it may be warning us against the effects of creating other human beings artificially or cloning.