Response To The Scaffles-Personal Narrative

I was sprawled out on my old bed with a quilt partially wrapped around me. It was cold in the bedroom. I had taken mom’s diary out of my suitcase. Tears rolled down my cheeks, as I laid there flipping through the pages.

Feeble, isolation and dreaded anticipation. I will describe my sadness as death by a thousand paper cuts. For every time I remember that my little boy is leaving me, possibly forever, another cut is sliced across my already weakened heart. None are enough to kill me, but powerful enough to deeply scar. My stinging heart clenches at the thought of the risk that he is putting himself up to. Slowly, I lift my trembling hand with the sellotape bandage wrapped around it, and limply brush off as many white cat hairs as possible. Holding back the temptation to graze my nose across the tip of his and run a hand through the gelled blackthorns of his hair. I attempted to distract myself by smoothening out the creases in the uniform. Can’t the clocks

My mind was going one thousand miles per hour, those words haunting my head. Hot tears flowed down my face as the words sunk in. I slumped in my seat feeling exhausted and too cold for this warm house. My father’s arms reached for me, trying to comfort me. He wouldn’t understand the mental loss that was turning into physical pain. My chest heaved for air, trying to get this drowning feeling out of these thoughts that envelope me bringing a soft cloak of anxiety. “Not again, please.”

Meanwhile, a specific sergeant tried to make my life harder. This sergeant enjoyed agonism which “occurs among those who enjoy fighting for its own sake and who perceive trading insults as a type of game” (p.21). I constantly tried to filter out the words being filled in my head, but my internal dialogue had been so negative and judgmental for so long I really believed the bad things. I could not and did not understand that I was good person with many good characteristics. I was fighting 2 wars in a combat zone, one against terrorists in the desert and the other inside my head.

“That Ray was not unhappy, he knew nothing of what was to come and so he did not suffer…he was happy in his lifetime, he loved his work, his domestic life, loved to garden…he did not suffer the loss of meaning that his survivor feels. Ray’s death was no tragedy but a completion” (Oates 241). This revelation was very powerful to me, as much as she is suffering depressed and having suicidal thoughts; she is able to start having moments of clarity. I saw this as a positive step in her healing. As she states “the widow must remember, her husband death did not happen to her but to her husband. I must stop dwelling upon the past, which can’t be altered” (Oates 228). She reminds herself that “you have your writing, your friends and your students” (Oates 264) and this gives me a sense of hope for her. I am eager to proceed with reading the last section of this book and knowing the outcome of this memoir; that I have enjoyed

The meadow near the Western Front was nothing compared to the vast fields of the prairie back home. There, in what seems like another lifetime, was a harvest full of life, colour, and promise. Here, there was only death and harshness. Trevor, our Commander, had once described the scenery of these fields in France before the chaos. He had said it was filled with little red flowers and high green grass. After three years of fatalities and rain, the scene shifted to represent the misery. There was no colour here. Our uniforms that had once been a deep green were now covered with dried mud. The scene before me was bleak. The sky was gray; as it had been since the first day we made camp in these trenches. The ground was muddy with small pools of

Vietnam war veteran and novelist Tim O’Brien, in his piece titled, “The Things They Carried,” portrays personal war stories of a group of soldiers during the Vietnam War to convey how stories and memories can aid in coping with death. The novel was extremely emotional and thought provoking, causing me to question what was real or not, and how these stories were more than just stories. As the novel progressed, it became increasingly clear how, for O’Brien and some of the other soldiers, these stories were not just stories for the them to reminisce on, they were a form of therapy, helping them to live on, even when faced with death and morbid experiences. Through these various stories ranging from the distant past and the present, O’Brien successfully

As this book pertains to his past, the choice of wording by the author shows the youth and free spirit of a twenty-year old that fell in love. For instance, “Have you ever been in a car with a southern girl blasting through South Carolina when Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Call Me the Breeze” comes on the radio? Sunday afternoon, sun out, windows down, nowhere to hurry back to? I never had…” shows the youthful spirit that Rob had when he was with Renee, for she truly did show him how to enjoy his youth and to have fun. However, as he reminisced through the pleasurable memories that Renee brought to him, using diction he was able to express to the reader the sadness her death bestowed upon him. "We met on September 17, 1989. We got married on July 13, 1991. We were married for five years and ten months. Renée died on May 11, 1997, very suddenly and unexpectedly, at home with me, of a pulmonary embolism. She was thirty-one…” Through syntax, he was able to show a change in mood from the serenity and peace that he felt with while being accompanied by Renee to her unexpected death in his arms. The short sentences in this excerpt from the book show that there was an abrupt interruption in his life and it caused a change in the way the author wrote. Nature took its course.

Life can come to a stop sometimes when a person is weighed down by burdens. For some people it may be too difficult to live in the present while constantly thinking about the past and because of this are unable to move on. These can be burdens that they have been carrying for a long time or even recently. In the short story, “The Things They Carried,”Tim O’Brien uses symbolism, ambiguity, and a non-linear narrative structure to illustrate emotional burdens.

One event in a person’s life can greatly impact their way of living and instances of this in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien and this includes experiences of loss of a loved one, forgiveness and unrequited love. It’s universal that our experiences as people affect us and shape who we are.

He woke up sweating and breathing roughly; it has been forty-eight years since the war, but every night, his nightmares take him back to the forest again. He’s scared of closing his eyes, because the darkness allows the images of bloody limbs, empty eye sockets, of death to fill his mind. I’ve never seen my father as helpless as he looks after waking up screaming, and to help ease his suffering, I decided to read the entries of a diary that he kept during and after the war:

“… yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place that I came from.” (On Going Home, 620). I can read this story and be fine. In actuality not really give a care about it. Yet, when I chose to write my reaction to the short story On Going Home by Joan Didion, I can’t help but have a vivid emotional connection with at least one idea portrayed in the story, and that connection lies in the nostalgic anxiety that overwhelms me whenever I “go home”.

The novel “Fugitive Pieces” by Anne Michaels is written in a powerful way to show the feelings of people who have gone through experience of their beloved ones’ painful deaths. There are two protagonists, Jakob and Ben who lead the broken life, as a result of the tragedy that not even the future generations will ever forget. They’re both left with damaged souls from the war; although they belong in two different generations, they still have an essential intersection point —of endless sorrow and pain. It’s not a story about a person from the post-war generation or a poet that had suffered from World War II but a memoir depicting tragic lives that had been deformed by having to face horrid life-threatening experiences and losing family

Assuming atrocious memories of violence ransacked their aging memory, promoting and even possibly prompting premature death, I chose to cease my query, but not in its entirety. Instead, I sat; I sat and transported myself to a mindset prior to my own conception, prior to my brief being, in order to fully understand the grief a war of such differences instigates within the passions of humanity. It undoubtedly renders one with a mindset that is acclimated to woes, in some cases these undeserving few may be pushed to the extent of developing a pessimistic outlook. Beyond that rather obvious observation, I grasped the heart of one who had experienced loss—I encouraged the agony and its consequent effects for a greater comprehension of the fury so many encircling me remained eternally stuck

Repression of memories is a psychological concept that has haunted modern psychology for years. Repression of memories also known as “rememory” defined by the mind pushing away traumatic or shocking experiences into a dark corner of a person’s unconscious. As this idea developed and began to be studied more thoroughly, slavery became an institution in which researchers saw promise in drawing conclusions about the dangers of repressing memories. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the character narratives of Paul D and Sethe exemplify the dangers of repressing memories. Both disconnect from and push away unwanted emotional traumas or experiences from their past. However, this effort doesn’t pay off and their repression of memories is not successful. Through the use of symbols such as Paul D’s tobacco tin and Sethe’s scars and lost child, Morrison demonstrates how repression of the past isn’t effective and how it always comes back to haunt a person who doesn’t correctly cope with their trauma. Paul D and Sethe live unfulfilled lives as a result of repressed memories.