`` The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Water Serves As A Metaphor For Mobility

The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.

The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.

Continuing with the views of Nguyen and his parents, Nguyen’s split identity of being Vietnamese and American is fueled by the way he interacts with his family. The aforementioned disagreement between Nguyen and his parents on fighting the

Ha’s mother is grieving the disappearance of her husband and the fall of Vietnam to Communism. The fallout of the Vietnam War causes separation for Ha and her family. Once in America, Ha finds that many in the small township move to ignore her culture and her heritage. Vietnamese culture and

At the beginning of Le Thi Diem Thuy’s novel, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, water provides a refuge to the narrator and her family by functioning as a pathway to a new and secured life. This water signifies a new beginning and becomes a dwelling place where the narrator retreats when searching for answers. As the narrator progresses in the story, her understanding of life also develops, and water in the story becomes a barrier; it never truly provides the answers or fixes the issues that engulf the narrator’s family like a surf on the beach. Instead, the water reflects the traumatic reality within the narrator’s life, whether she realizes it or not. Essentially, in The Gangster We Are All Looking For, water functions as a pathway and a barrier which illuminate the trauma that the narrator and her family experience in their lives after Vietnam’s colonization.

Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a novel that is a personal view of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese soldier. Like the American novel “The things they carried”, this novel brings about the effects of war on people, and especially how it defeats the human capacity for things such as love and hope. Bao Ninh offers this realistic picture of the Vietnam War’s impact on the individual Vietnamese soldier through use of a series of reminiscences or flashbacks, jumping backwards and forwards in time between the events most salient in memory, events which take on a different theme each time they are examined. His main protagonist Kien, who is basically Bao himself, looks back not just at his ten years at

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

"I have tried to describe accurately what the dominant event in the life of my generation, the Vietnam War, was like for the men who fought it" (Caputo, p. xxi). In Philip Caputo's own words, he describes the book he tried to write as an accurate portrayal of the events of the Vietnam War, not as he wished it had happened and not in protest of what happened. To this end, Caputo was successful. His book, A Rumor of War, provides a poignant and evocative glance into the lives of real men who fought in a war which no one who was not there could ever truly understand. In going about this, he touches on a variety of recurring themes in his book: the romanticizing of war vs. actual war, the personal aspects of war vs. impersonal aspects of war,

In the novel The Things They Carried and the documentary Regret to Inform, people that were involved share their recollection of events that occurred during the Vietnam War. Consequently, both works also share the underlying idea that people are affected by the war even after it is done. They convey this meaning through the stories of mental and physical harm each witness deals and dealt with because of the war.

Itemized In Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, the gruesome Vietnam War involving loss of companions, witnessing countless deaths and engagement in repulsive incidents prove dehumanizing and withdraws purity from once innocent soldiers. Norman Bowker committed suicide 3 years after the chapter “Speaking of Courage” was written, and this proved difficult for O’Brien. Bowker could not live with his agonizing memories after the war, and the inhuman scenes he witnessed. Mary Anne, a woman who joins her lover in the Vietnam War, begins as an innocent young girl.

There are many debates regarding the Vietnam War, but regardless of which side of the fence you sit on, none can argue that one of the most horrific massacres happened during this time. Most mothers and fathers would find it hard to believe that their sons would return home to them cold blooded murders. As one mother put it in an article while being interviewed by Mr. Hersh of the New York Times, “I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer”.

This shows the effects of the Vietnam War and how it can cause separation between the family not just physically but also mentally.

If Philip Caputo’s memoir is meant to be the story of an American soldier, Trâm’s diary becomes the story of the Vietnamese people and their struggle. On May 7th 1970 Trâm recounts her feelings on the history of war in Vietnam, and how the people still remain undeterred. “Twenty-five years immersed in fire and bullets, we are still strong.” Not only after all this fighting and after all that Trâm herself has witnessed and endured she is still confident in her country. “We will persevere and be courageous and hold our heads high and take the offensive.” Trâm’s diary makes it clear that there was never any doubt in

   Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War is a contrapuntal reading to American literature on the Vietnam War. But rather than stand in stark contrast to Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, The Sorrow of War is strangely similar, yet different at the same time. From a post-colonialist standpoint, one must take in account both works to get an accurate image of the war. The Sorrow of War is an excellent counterpoint because it is truthful. Tim O' Brien writes: ". . . you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." (O' Brien, 42) Bao Ninh succeeds in this respect. And it was for this reason that the Vietnamese

The Vietnam War divided the country and led to several americans searching for not only their identity and morals, but the morals of the nation as a whole. Many people questioned what good the fighting was for and saw more and more news coverage about the horrible failures of the War leading to a mistrust in the U.S. government. In Bobbie Ann Mason’s book, In Country: The Story of an American Family, Bobbie Ann Mason tells a coming of age story about Samantha Hughes who searches for understanding and meaning in a War that has affected her family and country greatly. Using dialogue and plot construction, Mason successfully examines the changes in morality towards violence and war.