Who is Bobby Jorgenson?
At this point in The Things They Carried, I think we're all pretty skeptical about what information being presented is factual or not. A lot of what is being written seems so true you can really feel the emotions, really see the story... and then O'Brien goes out and tells you that he made it all up. I suppose that is what he's explicitly told us he wanted to have happen. He wanted us to feel the way he felt, even if it wasn't the truth.
Isn't that exactly what he tried to do to Bobby Jorgenson?
In "The Ghost Soldiers", Tim wanted to take revenge on Jorgenson for failing to treat his bullet wound properly. At the top of page 184, the narrator (Tim) says, "I'd head down to the wire and stare out at the darkness, out where the war was, and think up ways to make Bobby Jorgenson feel exactly what I felt." Just as he was trying to make Jorgenson feel the way that he felt, the author has been trying to make readers feel what he felt.
He makes Jorgenson feel what he felt in a similar fashion to the readers. He's essentially putting Jorgenson in the middle of a fictional war story, making it seem extremely chaotic and supernatural, which has been a common theme in many of the war stories we've been told so far. He's giving Jorgenson the truth, even if it isn't factual, about what it feels like in Vietnam.
Being skeptical about how factual "The Ghost Soldiers" is, could Jorgenson possibly be another representation of a reader? It might be a bit of a stretch, but I definitely see a parallel between what Tim does to Jorgenson and what O'Brien is doing to us. If that's enough to at least tie us to Jorgenson, then what does that say about the way Jorgenson reacts to the prank? Does that perhaps represent a response readers give, or one he expects readers to give? And if Jorgenson does represent a reader, what is the effect of seeing how it feels for him to show us how something feels and see how we feel about it? And why would he put it this late into the collection, the third to last story?
Isn't that exactly what he tried to do to Bobby Jorgenson?
In "The Ghost Soldiers", Tim wanted to take revenge on Jorgenson for failing to treat his bullet wound properly. At the top of page 184, the narrator (Tim) says, "I'd head down to the wire and stare out at the darkness, out where the war was, and think up ways to make Bobby Jorgenson feel exactly what I felt." Just as he was trying to make Jorgenson feel the way that he felt, the author has been trying to make readers feel what he felt.
He makes Jorgenson feel what he felt in a similar fashion to the readers. He's essentially putting Jorgenson in the middle of a fictional war story, making it seem extremely chaotic and supernatural, which has been a common theme in many of the war stories we've been told so far. He's giving Jorgenson the truth, even if it isn't factual, about what it feels like in Vietnam.
Being skeptical about how factual "The Ghost Soldiers" is, could Jorgenson possibly be another representation of a reader? It might be a bit of a stretch, but I definitely see a parallel between what Tim does to Jorgenson and what O'Brien is doing to us. If that's enough to at least tie us to Jorgenson, then what does that say about the way Jorgenson reacts to the prank? Does that perhaps represent a response readers give, or one he expects readers to give? And if Jorgenson does represent a reader, what is the effect of seeing how it feels for him to show us how something feels and see how we feel about it? And why would he put it this late into the collection, the third to last story?
This reading of "The Ghost Soldiers" makes a lot of sense to me. Tim still views Jorgensen as new to the war, naive and inexperienced, or "green" (despite the fact that according to Sanders he *has* proven himself and become part of the company), and according to Tim, he needs to be taught something about this setting that he knows nothing about. (Just like the reader.) The only way to get him/us to "understand" is to somehow re-create the "feelings." So the "prank" can be viewed as a fiction--an invented situation where imaginary VC soldiers are menacing Jorgensen. The ambush isn't "true" in a factual sense (i.e. Tim and Azar have fabricated it), but it does reveal a deeper truth about the wartime setting, the darkness, the fear and paranoia. And just like Jorgensen, we too get angry when we realize O'Brien has been playing us. (How many readers want to point a figurative gun at the mannequin, so to speak, and shout "O'Brien!"? He *knows* he's provoking us.)
ReplyDeleteI think this is a really interesting way of reading this story. I like the comparison of Jorgenson to a reader, someone who doesn't know what the war is like and has to be taught, not with the real thing but with Tim O'Brien's fictionalized version of it. My question is how we can then understand Tim's reluctance to continue with the prank. It is his idea to set this up and gets Azar to help him. But it is Azar who finishes the prank when Tim is unable to continue and begs for him to stop. If Tim couldn't carry out his plan successfully on Jorgenson, why does he do it to us?
ReplyDeleteI never thought about the parallel between readers and Bobby, but I think it makes sense. Jorgensen is tricked by O'Brien to feel like he's experiencing war, and O'Brien is using his version of the "truth" to get us as readers to understand the war.
ReplyDeleteI think it's really interesting to compare the reader to Bobby Jorgenson because we both have false relationships to O'Brien as a result of this story. Bobby is made to experience the same chaos of war at the hands of Tim as we do from O'Brien, but both are fake in that Bobby's experience never actually happened and O'Brien is telling us a fictional story while insisting that it's true, effectively lying to us. Even as we and Bobby get a "taste" of war emotionally, the experience is false and as a result we have to question the accuracy the emotions described by Bobby as well as those felt by ourselves compared to the emotions of an actual war veteran.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really clever idea, and I think it works well. With O'Brien pulling the strings on us, the reader, and Tim pulling the strings (literally) to scare Jorgenson. One thing I remember that stood out to me was Tim describing what it was like to take the night shift. How you start to see faces and hear spirits as you look out into the pitch-black darkness and how scary it would be.
ReplyDelete