Also, there were these two lines that I found particularly meaningful (as well as beautifully written :o )
- "Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead" (speaking about war of course)
- "There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate into love, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery."
1) This feeling even for us who have not been to war, we understand. Whenever we hear of a death in our circle of friends/family, we know exactly what the author meant when he wrote this.
2) I understand that things would become unclear for someone in war because death becomes something so normal for you, since you are witnessing it every day. Things start mixing up and and basic principles start becoming confusing. Since your main purpose in war is to survive, and the only way to do that is to kill other people, killing becomes normal. However, for those people that are not in war, killing is immoral and as a a result wrong. It is for this reason that I understood the author when he said the above.
I agree with you, while reading this article I could also feel the restlessness of people in war. It is as if they are willing to do anything to survive and to hang on to life, since they know that they could die at any moment. There is also this omnipresent pain like you mentioned and I also think it must be so hard to lose people in this situation and be lonely, that is why I also feel empathy towards him...
ReplyDeleteI must say, I feel far more sympathetic towards the poor buffalo than anybody else. Nevertheless, I also see how the death of a friend and the perpetual danger of imminent death can depress soldiers and through the descriptions of their suffering can evoke the reader's sympathy.
DeleteSpeaking of suffering, it seems that nature or innocence is also suffering (inflicted upon it by humans). For example when the soldiers hear voices and report enemy movement because they can no longer bear to hear them, the author says: "It's all fire. They make those mountains burn" (6). Like the mountains, the buffalo cannot speak or defend itself as it is shot and shot and shot - it's unhappiness, guilt, the absence of Lemon, and your conscience you're trying to destroy Rat Kiley!
There is truth in a war story - an ugly truth, about inhumanness and self-imposed loss, revenge, and abuse, I believe.
Ain't gettn' sympathy for that.
The most precarious conditions will always bring to light the cruelty of human instinct to survive.
I really like the quotes you have put up, Shaharazade.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that I found particularly interesting in this article is the structure. Something like "A true war story is..." pops up from time to time, which gives the reader an insight into the author's viewpoint on war and truthfulness. Here are some of them:
"A true war story is never moral... If a story seems moral, do not believe it" (3).
"... you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil" (3).
Do gruesomeness, immorality, and evil in a war story make it more believable to you?
"You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you" (3).
"You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end" (6).
"True war stories do not generalize" (7).
"Often in a true war story there is not even a point..." (9).
"... a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do" (10).
These lines remind me of the article "Life on the Mississippi." I like the line "It's about sunlight" because it comes so unexpected. I thought of the light the author described when Lemon emerged from the darkness into the sunlight, his death. So maybe sunlight represents the truth, the exposure of the soldiers to the dangers of war.
Other revealing quotes:
ReplyDelete"War makes you a man; war makes you dead" (8).
"Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true" (8). Truth is contradictory.
"You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted" (9). Oftentimes one realizes what is really important - not only to one's life but also to one's self because one is alive - when it might already be too late.
Just as an informative comment, the use of caesura (a grammatical pause) is very effective in
Delete"War makes you a man; war makes you dead" (8).
and
"Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true" (8).
as a parallel structure to balance and juxtapose two ideas.
I like all these quotes and thank you for taking the trouble to find them and type them up... Looked at together like this I think we see how hard it is to "tell truth" not just about war, but about anything. There are so many truths and it all depends on where you are standing and upon what you already have in your head. However, even the contradictory truths are equally valid it seems to me. Absolute truth does not exist whether in history or in art.
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