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!!!!!!