At the close of the semester I have been considering the range of materials we have read for my Literary Responses to War and Peace. Each one provides a very different perspective of the war that the writing revolves around. Currently we are reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. And I think in many ways his perspective is the easiest to relate to. He is a man in his twenties when he is drafted and forced in to what he calls a “wrong war”. It is only in certain sections that the narrator in O’Brien’s stories are his 20 year old self. Many perspectives from his 40 year old self looking back on his adolescence spent during the war and now he has lived two lifetimes (his 40 years being split between the two 20 segments). Now, granted I am not on the verge of being drafted into a war I do not support but be in the same time frame of life and having similar political convictions I feel like I can more easily relate to what he is writing. His perspective of as an author also causes me to connect very strongly with this text. At the end of the section titled “Spin” O’Brien comments on his perspective, being of an author creating story and being separated from the war by time.
He says, “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. An sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. 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. Stores are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (O’Brien 38).
This concept highlights the fact that every story is individual to narrator and this stories serve as our memories and our lenses of certain situations. The influence our future perspectives. In the blog, A Family in Baghdad the author writes in the most recent post about they way people of the Western world have false perspectives and inadequately use them to examine other cultures.
Faiza Al-Arji states, “Most of the writers are Americans. This means that they write about the events from an American perspective… Young and naïve students [who have gone abroad to study] who lack experience may get brain washed and return to his home country to apply the twisted theories that he studied in the western or eastern countries. Most of the time, these theories don’t represent the real life in his country.”
Although not all of the students she refers to are going to be contributing to “stories” that will reach masses of people, they do construct their own personal stories. And now that their perspective has been altered to that of a Western one, Faiza Al Arji implies a fear that this will be detrimental to the country’s/population’s future. This idea is backed up by O’Brien’s description of what story is and how it connects what you learned or experienced in the past to who you deal with things in present and future.
