Ambush by tim o brien sparknotes

Scholarly Article Annotation

For this assignment, find a scholarly article on your Week 4 short story in the SUO Library. First, complete the lecture on conducting research in the SUO Library. Next, enter the online library and find one credible, scholarly source examining the short story that was the focus of your Week 4 rough draft. Do not use popular publications, such as Masterplotssummaries or other media that are not research oriented. Refer to this Research Guide and this video provided for this course by South University Online Library Services.

Post an annotation of your source to the discussion board. Your annotation should include:

A complete APA citation of your scholarly article
A paragraph of summary of the key points presented in your source
A paragraph explaining the source’s quality and how it is relevant to your analytical essay

Symbolic Aesthetics in Tim O’Brien’s “The Man I Killed” Koki Nomura A soldier’s compassion towards the dying enemy soldier appears in much of the world’s great war literature. The authors are concerned about whether or not the killers are capable of seeking God’s mercy and forgiveness for what they did to their victims. This seems to be the case in the literature of any war, with or without a noble cause. Jonathan Shay, psychiatrist for Vietnam veterans, reveals that destroying the enemy can be as terrible an experience as the death of one’s comrades (Achilles 115-19) and a person of good character feels moral pain after making another person suffer even if it was entirely unavoidable (Odysseus 112). The best account in Western war literature of the killer-victim relationship and the killer’s strong sense of guilt is perhaps Erich Maria Remarque’s WWI novel, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Its protagonist Paul Baumer, a young German draftee, spends a whole day in a trench speaking to and imagining the life story of the slowly dying British soldier whom he has just stabbed (216-27). Remarque is suggesting here that the dead enemy is a young man with good memories and future prospects, and the killer is also a young man—who was recruited by the Nazis—with moral pain. American war literature also has a tradition of portraying this killer-victim relationship. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’ The Thin Red Line (1962), both of which give detailed accounts of Americans’ battles in the Pacific during WWII, should be mentioned as good examples. In Mailer’s work, Red Valsen, staring at a headless Japanese soldier, comes to believe that the dead man had “once wanted things” and “had a childhood, a youth and a young manhood, and there had been dreams and memories” (216). Eddie Bead in Jones’ work, meanwhile, after having “gone crazy with fear” and stabbing a Japanese rifleman to death, wishes that he could have done it “with less pain and anguish for the poor man.” Bead then imagines “a mental picture of them both with positions reversed” (146). Both Mailer and Jones seem to be concerned about having at least one soldier in the platoon who feels moral pain. For authors who write about the Vietnam War, however, war seems rather more complex than it was for Mailer and Jones. One major reason for this ESSAYS 87 is Vietnam’s blurred lines of combat and its guerilla-warfare. Vietnam War ficiton and films thus tend to highlight the war’s chaos and soldiers’ violence while the soldiers’ moral pain has rarely been presented. In over three decades since the end of the war, Tim O’Brien is the only American novelist who has dealt with the soldier’s combat and postwar trauma. A master at portraying the American soldier-veteran’s haunted mind, he usually does so with a rich blend of realism, imagery, and symbolism. His best account of the soldier’s atrocity trauma, however, is “The Man I Killed,” which concerns Tim, a young U. S. Army draftee in Vietnam. O’Brien’s books have won many prestigious awards and have been translated into foreign languages. He also personally expressed his guilt and grief for the long-suffering Vietnamese people in a 1994 essay recounting his first return to Vietnam since the end of the war. He felt “guilt chills” at the site of the My Lai Massacre: “Do not forget: our hosts are among the maimed and widowed and orphaned, the bombed and rebombed. . .” (50). I propose to examine the symbolic aesthetics of “The Man I Killed” in detail. This story-chapter of the novel The Things They Carried (1990) is the best representative of O’Brien’s art of symbolism, an art that has been poorly critiqued by scholars especially with the respect to this particular story. I will discuss this primarily by deciphering the meanings of the following symbols in the story: the physical characteristics of the dead Vietnamese soldier, natural objects around the body, and Tim’s two comrades at the site. I begin my discussion with O’Brien’s presentation of the victim’s body. Throughout the story, guilt-ridden Tim is sitting on the ground and staring at the body of a young Vietnamese soldier lying on the trail, a soldier he has just ambushed and killed with a hand grenade. The Vietnamese soldier had been patrolling and had not noticed Tim and his comrades in the ambush. O’Brien opens the story with a detailed description of the dead man’s face: “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole . . . red and yellow” (124, 126). Because this description of the eyes (one shut; the other open, star-shaped, role-like, redyellow) is repeated six times in the story, those eyes are clearly O’Brien’s central symbol of this story. Critics of O’Brien’s novel have made only vague and half-finished remarks with regard to the victim’s face and eyes. For instance, one critic states simply that the characteristics of his face “take on significance and abstraction” (Bloom 45). Another critic asserts that the star suggests “an idea that in death a body becomes mystical and beautiful” (SparkNotes 68). Indeed, we see contrast and 88 SHORT STORY irony and even surrealism in descriptions of the man’s face, and yet the careful reader may ask why the wound has to be star-shaped. Jill Colella, meanwhile, reads the star as “hope, like a wishing star,” stating that the man was gazing more upon the stars than upon his situation in war and the stars betrayed him and his bright future (58). That she finds irony in the symbolic juxtaposition of the star and the man’s fate is persuasive, especially considering O’Brien’s sixtime repetition of the eyes and the shape. But Colella doesn’t explain why one eye is closed and the other one is opened. David Jarraway asserts simply that Tim’s preoccupation with the eyes is “perhaps O’Brien’s own fixation . . . where we catch sight of trauma’s unfinished business” (704). Since O’Brien tends to distrust narrative closure, such an appraisal of this narrative tactic seems appropriate. Those eyes should be taken as author O’Brien’s rejection of an end to moral conflict in writing. They characterize Tim’s undying trauma as well. That O’Brien likes to bring ambivalent body-part symbolism into his work lends easy credibility to Jarraway’s analysis (“unfinished”). Yet, he makes no reference to the opened eye’s shape and colors. Here is my analysis: The closed eye (death, oblivion); the opened eye (life, memory); star and hole (universe, uncertainty, God’s vision, sexual implication); and red-yellow (the dead man’s rage, God’s rage). Eyes are universally taken as a symbol of God’s watchfulness over man’s actions (Chevalier 362-63) and also believed in many countries to be a mirror of man’s body and soul. In sum, the opened eye’s shape and colors can be read as a reminder of the killer’s actions and their consequences. Here, O’Brien is trying to make himself, Tim, and the reader feel guilty about the war and its casualties by imprinting the image of death on them and giving them the idea that the dead man will forever gaze at them. Tim next attempts to inspect the man’s whole body and re-create his life history as well. From the man’s being “thin,” “delicately boned,” and his eyebrows being “arched like a woman’s,” Tim comes to believe that he was not a soldier-type but a scholar-type who was drafted against his will. “He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. . . . He hoped the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped. He kept hoping and hoping, . . . He had no stomach for violence” (125, 127). Lorrie Smith, in her article “The Things Men Do,” insists that the man’s body symbolizes “the unrepresentable— death, Asian, enemy” and is “feminized . . . to underscore its absolute otherness” so that O’Brien’s description of the body is “narcissism” and “almost homoerotic fixation” (22). Indeed, the reader cannot deny that his body has a feminine quality, and yet, to my Asian eye, O’Brien’s feminization seems rather ESSAYS 89 realistic. It would be very surreal if the dead man had the muscle-hardened body of John Rambo; an average Vietnamese man, needless to say, is much smaller and less muscular than an average North American man. Moreover, it was the very slightness of the Vietnamese that contributed to the effectiveness of their guerilla-warfare and allowed them to take command of the jungles. As for Smith’s use of “homoerotic,” combat soldiers’ brotherly love is supposed to be something very special because they must carry injured comrades on the battlefield, and it is commonly accepted that this strong bond between men often contributes to gay behavior or activity in the military, especially in combat. It is a complex mixture of brotherhood, sympathy, and maybe homosexuality; we do not have to be in the military or in a football team to understand this. Moreover, William Broyles, a Vietnam veteran and screen player, writes that he felt a brotherly bond between him and his former enemy soldiers when he revisited Vietnam in 1984. He calls this bond “something almost beyond words” (263). Thus, O’Brien’s feminization of the body might have stemmed from his sense of America’s overpowering and victimizing lessmuscular, lighter-bodied, and almost frail-looking Vietnamese men. Tim’s imaginary re-creation of the man’s whole life can be taken as an indicator of O’Brien’s moral pain and compensation. Tim next notices a gold ring in the man’s right hand and finds in his pouch a snapshot of a young Vietnamese woman. He thus assumes that the man’s life was about to flourish: “His life was now a constellation of possibilities. . . . He devoted himself to his studies. . . . In his final year at the university, he fell in love with a classmate, . . . One evening, perhaps, they exchanged gold rings” (128-29). Mark Heberle sees Tim’s re-creation of the dead man’s life history as “an obituary” (201). Apparently, O’Brien is writing an obituary for the man. Or, it seems as if he is offering him a small military funeral. Also, as Tobey Herzog has already pointed out, this man reminds the reader of Tim himself as he is introduced in one of the chapter-stories in the same book. Parallels to O’Brien’s own background are obvious, though Herzog has also found identical life histories in Tim and his victim: their birth year is 1946; their first year in college is 1964; they were both drafted; and their attitude towards this war is reluctant (110). (My list includes three more items: their birthplace is a politically conservative small town; their scholarly achievements are high; and they both feared to lose the respect of family and community by dodging the draft or performing poorly in combat). Thus, Herzog sees in this agreement O’Brien’s “sympathetic identification with the enemy,” but he also says that O’Brien is only mounting “his self-centered perspective . . . onto this 90 SHORT STORY unknowable Vietnamese” (110). If it is self-centeredness (Herzog) or narcissism (Smith), the next question is why O’Brien is framing himself onto the enemy. There is no doubt that Tim’s identification with the victim is a reflection of O’Brien’s own compassion towards the dead man. But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story (I shall discuss this later). I will now discuss the two natural objects surrounding the man’s body: the butterfly and the small, blue, bell-shaped flowers. In the story, the butterfly flies around and sometimes lands on the man’s disfigured face while the flowers are in bloom along the trail. Few critics have made remarks on the symbolism of those objects. One critic sees ironical “beauty and gore” in them, concluding, however, that the story is about “the beauty of life rather than the gruesomeness of death” because the butterfly and the flowers stay and find “their home around the tragedy” (SparkNotes 46). Similarly, another critic finds around the body “a mix of death and ruin with beauty and movement” (Bloom 45). As they both say, O’Brien’s irony and contrast is obvious. Also, these objects add more femininity to the body. Yet, the butterfly, to be exact, does fly away near the end of the story so that it cannot be said it has found a home there. Further, neither critic has referred to the characteristics of the flowers nor to the reason why the dead man “seemed to be staring at some distant object beyond the bell-shaped flowers along the trail” (129). On the surface level, the butterfly and the flowers give the story a visual symbolism, and yet the more careful reader may notice O’Brien’s semantic symbolism in the text, which is another of O’Brien’s favorite literary devices. First, the butterfly is certainly a universal symbol of beauty, but in the SinoVietnamese world it is a symbol of long life, and flowers, often associated with butterflies, are for the souls of the dead (Chevalier 140, 396). Second, the flower appearing in this story, I would assume, is campanula medium, which is also known as church bell. Ultimately, the butterfly and the bell-shaped flowers can be taken as the indicators of the dead man’s lost wishes of becoming a scholar and having a wedding in a bell-ringing temple, which he might have promised his girlfriend. This explains what probably exists “beyond the flowers”—his future, particularly a long one to make all of his dreams come true, instead of fighting and getting killed in the war. Thus, the butterfly, together with the flowers, stands for the young Vietnamese man’s lost wishes. Finally, I will discuss Tim’s two comrades, Kiowa and Azar, who join him in the site. Approaching Tim, Kiowa sympathetically tells the traumatized killer ESSAYS 91 to stop staring at the body and he also tries to justify Tim’s actions: “Tim, it’s a war. The guy wasn’t Heidi—he had a weapon, right? . . . A good kill—weapon, ammunition, everything” (126, 129). The more Kiowa tries to justify the kill, the less Tim is able to do so. Also, Kiowa tries and fails to make him express his feelings: “Man, I’m sorry. . . . Why not talk about it? . . . Come on, man, talk. . . . Talk” (130). Meanwhile, Azar celebrates Tim’s success in executing the enemy: “Oh, man, you fuckin’ trashed the fucker, . . . On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus” (125-26). Kiowa quickly interrupts Azar’s trash talk and drives him away from the site. Tim neither responds to his comrades nor says a word to them throughout the story. The reader can easily see a contrast in character between the two soldiers. Kiowa, a Native American Baptist and Tim’s closest friend in Vietnam plays the role of Tim’s sympathizer. Meanwhile, Azar, the war lover, seems more amazed than scarred by the grotesque nature of war. On the surface level, Kiowa’s words may please the non-veteran, pacifist reader who is likely to feel an intimate connection with him, taking his side and feeling bad with him. Yet, what Kiowa is trying to achieve at the kill site is to remind Tim of his soldierly duties and to rationalize his actions. In fact, Kiowa was sleeping at the time of the ambush, so there is no way for him to know Tim’s true motive in killing the man. Indeed, in a following story-chapter “Ambush,” it is revealed that Tim’s kill was unnecessary: “It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man. . . . It was not a matter of live or die. There was no peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way” (132-33). In other words, Tim killed the man out of his own fear and impatience, not out of patriotism or soldierly duty. Now, the full story having been told, the reader is aware that Tim’s anxietyridden kill makes him embarrassed, speechless, and traumatized. Compared with Kiowa’s soldierly comments, young and reckless Azar seems to have spoken more truth about the blunt and grotesque nature of war, which may be O’Brien’s twist in characterization. Yet, what seems more significant here is that Kiowa, together with Azar, could conceivably represent two groups in O’Brien’s contemporary American audience: doves who hated the war but never blamed the soldiers (Kiowa) and hawks who justified the war but blamed government leaders for their handling of it (Azar). Over the years, Tim seems to have worked so hard not to end up taking Kiowa’s position: “Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t” (134). Here O’Brien is asking the reader to ponder Tim’s life-long moral conflict and the needless nature of his kill, possibly of the entire war. In conclusion, the 92 SHORT STORY comforter, Kiowa, and the war lover, Azar, act as symbols to highlight their comrade: Tim, the self-blamer. In conclusion, all of these symbols in the story contribute to highlight the combat soldier’s undying guilt and trauma. The dead man’s physical characteristics and belongings—a strange pair of eyes, frail body, a gold ring, and a photo of a girlfriend—symbolize the man’s rage, gazing at the killer and the whole world, and of course Tim’s re-creation of the man’s life history is a literary tactic on the part of O’Brien that allows the American reader to see him as another human being. Meanwhile, two natural objects around the body—the butterfly and the bell-shaped flowers—symbolize the man’s lost wishes. Finally, the contrasting characters of Tim’s two comrades—Kiowa and Azar—mirror two main types of O’Brien’s readership, which helps make the self-blamer’s state of shock stand out in the story. Furthermore, the speechlessness of the killer may imply two more things. One: It shows O’Brien’s literary skill in presenting combat trauma’s unspeakable nature by removing Tim’s language and feelings from the text. Two: If he is so speechless, he might be the one who actually dies in the story. Or maybe they both die, making Tim and the dead man nearly identical in character. In the end, the moral pain a soldier feels in taking another person’s life can be as terrible as his own death. Jill Colella asserts that here O’Brien is making the war “more personal than historical and political” (58). Rather, it seems that he is making it more real, considering that America views this morally confusing war as a tragedy, thus obscuring discussion of why people on both sides had to die. It is apparent here that O’Brien is returning, to the country that sent him to Vietnam, an image of its soldier’s moral moratorium and the unspeakable nature of atrocity guilt. Like one of his protagonists, O’Brien himself has survived war-related depression, divorce, and suicidal impulses. As Tina Chen has already pointed out, indeed, O’Brien’s war stories are about “learning to live not through Vietnam but with it” (80). It is true that O’Brien has brought his political and personal messages into his writing. But what seems more important is that he is making the dead live again in his writing and also treating the Vietnam War as horrible and ridiculous and reprehensible as any other war. The horrors of killing and getting killed in O’Brien’s Vietnam stories find their parallels in the novels of Remarque, Crane, Mailer, Jones, and any other war writer of merit. After all, war is always fought by young men and women who, when mortally wounded, all face death thinking of memories and wishes, not of guns, geopolitics, and hatred towards their enemy. In his beautifully symbolized text in “The Man I Killed,” Tim O’Brien has presented the universal truth that, in war, everybody ESSAYS 93 dies and what is left is a story that can resurrect man’s life, wishes, and finally, pain.