Nan Ni
Larson 6th
October 24th, 2003
O’Brien Essay
Defeating Death
Scientist, writer and anthropologist Ernest Becker once said, “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” Human beings have always had a hard time looking death in the eye and often, they handle their emotions through the avoidance or distortion of the real. Tim O’Brien, who served as an infantry soldier in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, has seen his share of death. He returned from the war sound in mind and body, if not spirit, and he tells powerful stories to endure his pain. In The Things They Carried, he presents us with two narratives in which the protagonists employ contrasting methods of coping with death: Tim, in The Lives of the Dead, brings the deceased back to life in his mind while Mary Anne chooses to add to the destruction around her in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. O'Brien does not explicitly provide an explanation for why Tim and Mary Anne reacted to death in the way they did, but upon close examination of the stores, one can infer that the cause of the dichotomy lies in the nature of the characters' experience with death.
Death, like life, is a continuous interplay of fact and imagination. O'Brien and his fictional personification, Tim, feel the need to transmute terrible memory into a livable present: as the living, they feel responsible for keeping the dead alive, somehow. Since there is no way to physically bring them back, they can only make the dead live on in their minds and by doing so, the living characters feel as if they have gotten the upper hand with death. Says Tim, "In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead" (Lives of the Dead, 806). The incident at the beginning of The Lives of the Dead, when Tim's platoon lines up to shake hands with an dead old man, shows that everybody needs to belittle death. After all, if the gentleman can still shake hands, he can’t be all that dead, right? Later, when they are preparing Ted Lavender's body for the "dustoff", O'Brien realizes that "It wasn't the blood [he] hated; it was the deadness." (Lives, 802) His comrade, Mitchell Sanders feels the same uneasiness, and begins teasing Ted as if he was still alive. "'Hey Lavender,' He says, 'how's the war today?'" After his levity shatters the solemn air, the other men relax and begin replying for Ted, since he cannot answer the question himself. The men are literally laughing in the face of death, and they feel better after doing so. Many years later, the narrator, at 43, still hasn't yet come to terms with the death of his first love, Linda, who succumbed to brain cancer at age 9. He keeps her memory alive by fabricating "elaborate stories" in which they are reunited (Lives, 808): “At nighttime I'd slide into sleep knowing that Linda would be there waiting for me…That's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk" (Lives, 809). In this way, Tim evades her death, because as Linda tells him, "‘it doesn't matter'" (Lives, 806). Tim chooses to believe in Jack Lemmon’s words: “Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
