Exploration Three - Harmeet Bhachu

Reading Response for The Things They Carried

1.
I practice the teqniques mentioned in the Curious Writer in my active reading, or I try to, and have seen great results. One trick I have to better grasp the plot is I write at the top of each page what happened in that page. It helps me reflect on what I have read, and notice other things if I have to reread. I noted lots of repetition within the chapter 'How to Tell a True War Story'. The significance to all those repeated phrases and words all hold meaning to O'Brien and the Character he is telling about. Whether it is through dialogue or weaved within the narration, it cannot be skipped. Through this repetition, From his repetition of 'a true war story,' O'Brien captures the attention of the reader though his use of storytelling (whether it be fiction or nonfiction).

2.
The story of Rat shooting down the baby water buffalo is something that caught my attention. My interpretation on this short scene was that Rat was using his anger and sadness to show that the bullet shots all affect him. That he was hurting inside and out because of the loss of Lemon and all the heaviness of the war that has taken a burden on him. O'Brien could have left out the fact that the buffalo 'was still alive, though just barely, in the eyes' after all those shots (79). How he kept narrating the scene after the shoots allow us to interpret that Rat could still live, like the buffalo had. With a push of others, Rat could still bare the pain and emotions bottled up within him and live without Lemon.
Relating back to question 1, O'Brien relies heavily on repetition to show the emotions of Rat here. Many times throughout the scene of Rat shooting the buffalo, O'Brien repeats the fact that Rat is shooting the buffalo. He reassures the reader that he is inflicting pain onto this animal. He reassures the reader that he does not stop, he just keeps on shooting.

3.
A character that stands out to me the Most is Mitchell Sanders. Usually in war stories, characters and people are seen to have a tough mental state of mind and to hold thing in ‘like men’. For Sanders, his story telling ability is what fought my attention the most. When he tells the story of the men listening on the mountains, he doesn’t really put on a tough face towards O’Brien. O’Brien captures this unique character very well in his dialogue. When he speaks, he repeats certain phrases like ‘spooky’ and ‘dead-on true’ and even goes back to repeating whole scenes to emphasize his point across to O’Brien. Through dialogue, no character has shows this much repetition. He goes on for four pages just telling, through long paragraphs, a simple story of these soldiers. That caught my attention because no character has shown to speak for that long in one period of time and with run-on sentences like how he does. I think through him telling this story, Sanders shows a different side of him the readers had not seen before. Before, he was somewhat of an insignificant background character. Through my theory, I think the war has had an impact on his speech. I think the war has had an impact on his thought process, making it all scatter brained and messy, as seen in his speech.
Because of that, I saw the type of soldier he was, not one that is all ‘lone-wolf’ or kept to the self with a macho face and mentality. Sanders pushed the boarder for many things through four pages of dialogue, that’s what makes him my favorite.