FREE ESSAY ON MASKS OF ALTERED REALITY

MASKS OF ALTERED REALITY

In Timothy O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, a number of insightful themes are
forwarded by the author. One theme in particular interests me the most; the subject area
is how people handle their emotions through the avoidance or distortion of reality.
Specifically, throughout the novel a number of characters respond to the emotionally
charged realities they are confronted with in one of two major ways, distortion or
escapism. This pattern, shown throughout the novel, surveys one manner in which humans
approach the rough emotions they carry with them throughout their life. To support this
thesis I will analyze a number of character's responses to emotional stressors and
compare them against my claims of escape and distortion reactions. 
I have identified two major ways the characters I analyze respond to their realities in
this novel, distortion and escapism. When I identify something as distortion, I intend to
imply that the characters take the edge off of the reality of their situations by making
the events they encounter seem less real. Examples of such behavior would include finding
humor in otherwise horrifying situations or even romanticizing the environment around
them to make it seem something different than what it is. The escapist manner of reacting
to the intensity of emotions is to distance oneself from the actual events or
surrounding. To accomplish this all a character needs to do is to daydream themselves
away from the problem or to create alternative realities in their own mind.
It is important to establish that O'Brien develops the premise that the emotions and
situations these men had to deal with were very intense and traumatic. Beyond the more or
less obvious contention that dealing with death and war might be painful, there is
textual support that O'Brien is trying to get this message across. On page 20, the
narrator says, They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief,
terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and
specific gravity, they had tangible weight. This analysis sets up textual basis for my
theme. If it is true that these soldiers experience (d) tremendous emotions then there is
room to analyze how they go about carrying their tangible emotional baggage.
Additionally, it should be noted that the characters I analyze in this paper are only a
small representative sample of the larger number of characters who may very well fit my
within my thesis statement. It is also noteworthy to mention that how I classify a
character in terms of their response to emotional intensity-escape or distortion-is very
much a debatable contention. Given that, I do believe, however, that my conclusions will
stand on the merit of my analysis.
In the first chapter, Timothy O'Brien wastes no time examining one coping mechanism,
escapism. Escapism is a rather basic way of handling intense emotions. Timothy O'Brien
first introduces a character named Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who exhibits the escapist
manner of dealing with his emotions. Jimmy Cross is the Lieutenant of the group of men
that this story focuses on. Jimmy Cross is first introduced fantasizing about his love, a
girl name Martha. Martha is a student back home in New Jersey and for all intents and
purposes does not return Lieutenant Cross's love. On pages 3 and 4, the narrator comments
that, They [the letters] were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that
Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant.
Thus, despite the fact that Lieutenant Cross acknowledges that Martha probably does not
return his love, he still daydreams about falling in love with Martha and the times they
spent together before the war. The somewhat excessive, so it seems to the reader, amount
of time Jimmy Cross spends thinking about Martha may indeed be a failure of reading. We
ask ourselves why it is that Jimmy Cross spends so much time thinking about Martha? This
and other similar questions about the daydreaming provide room for interpretation.
This daydreaming of Martha is a way of escaping the intensity of emotion Jimmy Cross has
to bear during the war. We find out that in the week before Ted Lavender dies Jimmy Cross
daydreams a great deal about Martha. This daydreaming helps to take him away from the
intensity of the war. On pages 9 and 10 the narrator describes how Lieutenant Cross would
walk along his missions thinking about spending time with Martha. While on tour,
Lieutenant Cross once received a pebble in a letter from Martha. This inspired him to
daydream about how she must have kept it in her breast. He escaped to the beach where she
found the pebble and vividly thought about the waves crashing upon the beach of the
Jersey shoreline. The narrator identifies how distracting this daydreaming is when he
says, He [Jimmy Cross] had difficulty keeping his attention on the war (9-10). The
daydreaming about Martha is a way that Cross took himself completely away from the war.
He could be thousands of miles away on a quiet beach in Jersey as the war raged on around
him.
Another character who demonstrates escapism is our child of the Song Tra Bong, Mary Anne.
This act of escape is slightly more radical than Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's response,
however. The chapter, The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, allows the reader a chance to
evaluate a more extreme reaction to the emotions of war. The story of Mary Anne begins
with her boyfriend who is part of a small medical regiment located along a river, called
the Song Tra Bong. Rat Kiley is the narrator of the story; he was also a part of this
regiment, along with Mary Anne's boyfriend, Mark Fossie. Rat Kiley explains how Mark
Fossie arranged to have his girlfriend brought over to Vietnam, so they could be
together. Marry Anne comes over to Vietnam and is delivered to the medical outpost by way
of supplies chopper. Mary Anne is depicted by O'Brien to be very innocent. She is
described as a soft, curious, and friendly person adorned in her pink sweater. The
feminine elements are stressed in the description of her in order to juxtapose her
against the harsher, more masculine, surroundings. It is this dissimilarity, between Mary
Anne's serenity and the war's roughness, which allows us to see how fully the war could
force a person to confront an uncomfortable reality. 
As the story progresses Mary Anne begins to change from her bubbly and alive pink sweater
persona into a more withdrawn individual. On page 109, Rat Kiley describes, The way she
quickly fell into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped
wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped it in a dark green bandana. A noticeable
point of departure is when Mary Anne begins to spend more and more time with the Green
Berets and even goes on an ambush with them. After going on the ambush Mary Anne is
remarkably withdrawn. Despite that she temporarily seems to get straightened out by her
boyfriend and ends up wearing a nice blue dress and has groomed hair the next day, she is
still distinctly different than before. As Rat Kiley notes on page 113, Over dinner she
kept her eyes down, poking at her food, subdued to the point of silence. Questions run
through the reader's mind at this point. What did she see out there? What does she feel?
Why is she acting like this? These questions signify a failure of reading. They force us
to wonder what to make of Mary Anne's character change and her reactions. The remainder
of the story of Mary Anne brings us to her eventual departure into the jungle. Not on a
mission with the Green Berets, but alone. She simply disappears. If we conjecture that
while on their missions the Green Berets ambushed and killed people, then it is
reasonable to assume that Mary Anne experienced and witnessed killing. Perhaps, the
horror of such acts forced her to run. The intense emotions that the war produces within
simply got to her. Her reaction was to escape. She escaped from a world in which she had
to deal with the emotions into a world in which she let herself be consumed by them.
These two examples support the idea that when confronted with great emotional shock
people desperately try to avoid the reality of their situation. Alas, escape is not the
only way Timothy O'Brien develops this theme. Another way to respond to the reality of a
situation wrought with emotional dismay is to distort that reality. What does it mean to
distort reality? It means to make reality seem not what it is. To alter how one views the
situation. To take the edge off realities harshness. To dull the otherwise piercing
emotional intensity. There are a couple of significant examples of reality distortion
that I will identify. The first example is the use of humor in otherwise horrifying
situations in order to make the situation less real. After Ted Lavender dies the men in
his company make fun of the circumstances of his death. Ted Lavender was urinating while
he was shot and he also happened to be doped up at the time. It is important to note that
Ted Lavender used tranquilizers in abnormally large amounts. They made jokes about his
death. Mitchell Sanders provides a specific example of this behavior. Shortly after
Lavender's death Sanders made a joke that The moral's pretty obvious. Sanders said, and
winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they'll ruin your day every time (20). The
narrator says the men even joked about how poor guy didn't even feel a thing, how
incredibly tranquil he was (20). The joking about death is a failure of reading. We might
ask ourselves why would people joke about such issues? Do they have no emotions?
It is when we ask these questions that we see yet another instance of reality avoidance
in the novel. These men are not emotionless; on the contrary, they are so filled with
internal emotional conflict that their joking is a way of responding to the reality they
are faced with, the death of a friend and fellow soldier. The narrator says on page 19,
They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to
tell. They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. This quotation
captures very accurately the idea that some people respond to intense emotion through
humor. This is yet another method of reality avoidance in emotionally intense
situations.
The final example I will analyze is in regards to the story of Norman Bowker. This story
is a good example of the distortion that often occurs when people are working through
emotionally taxing situations. Norman Bowker is a member of the company that Timothy
O'Brien was in during Vietnam. After the war, Norman Bowker returned home to his quiet
hometown of Des Moines. The story revolves around Norman Bowker driving around the town.
Specifically, Norman drives around a lake near Sunset Park. In this story Bowker thinks
to himself about his life and how things might have been different if he had not gone to
the war. After a while, it becomes apparent the Bowker keeps imaging conversations he
would have with people given different circumstances. One such conversation is what he
might have said to people if he had received the silver medal of courage. In particular,
he imagines what the conversation with his father would have been like. Then again, he
creates a number of conversations with his former heartthrob, Sally. At one point in the
story Bowker attempts to speak his story or his mind to the person over the intercom at
A&W. Even then he cannot bring himself to talk about. The narrator on page 172 tells us
that He could not talk about it and never would. This inability to talk about the war
and, moreover, the made up conversations, are grounds for interpretation.
The ending of this story suggests that Norman Bowker had some deeply held emotional
problems he needed to deal with. This claim has warrant because at the end of this story
Norman Bowker kills himself. Keep in mind the thesis; people distort their reality when
confronted with extreme emotional conflict. Given that, we can now make some sense of the
conversations Norman Bowker fantasizes about. Quite simply, Norman Bowker is experiencing
readjustment problems and cannot cope with his sadness. So, he distorts his silent
reality, in which he cannot bring himself to speak to anyone, by creating made up
conversations with people. These conversations serve as a coping device for his emotions,
which are otherwise kept bottled up.
The repetition of different characters avoiding the very real and emotionally difficult
situations they encounter suggests something larger about people. The war, as the
backdrop for The Things They Carried, provides Timothy O'Brien with the cause for
emotional conflict in his characters. From this starting point the novel becomes quite a
valuable document for examining how people deal with their emotional baggage. The
repetitive avoidance through either escapism or distortion is an insight this novel gives
us about people at large. As said on page 21, By and large they carried these things
inside, maintaining the masks of composure. Given this observation, it might be said that
some people wear masks that alter their perception of reality and others wear masks that
give them flight.