Sweetheart of the Song of Tra Bong Essay

On page 92 in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Rat Kiley uses the simile “...like a cheerleader visiting the opposing team's locker room,” to describe the sight of Mary Anne visiting the village of Tra Bong. Mary Anne is compared to a cheerleader because she is a young cute girl all dolled up in nice clothes while visiting a poor village with “thatched roofs” and “naked children.” This simile is to compare the odd sight of a well dressed girl in this run down village in Vietnam, to illustrate how

prevalent in both The Lord of The Flies by William Goldberg and “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” by Tim O’brien, as both stories cause the characters introduced in their isolated settings to adapt in a way that reflect their new surroundings. These characters start out as normal individuals, but as time passes, they accustom themselves to the new circumstances they face. As demonstrated by Mary Anne from “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong” and Jack from The Lord of the Flies a severe change in environment

Sweetheart of the Song of Tra Bong as Metaphor   The Vietnam War is a strange and unexplainable event in American history. The controversies surrounding the American involvement in Vietnam and the need for Vietnam veterans to tell their stories of the war are prevalent in the post-Vietnam culture of America. "The stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane"(89). The story of the sweetheart of the Song

Does deviating from one’s gender norms inevitably doom one down a spiral of moral corruption? Tim O'Brien, author of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” and Ernest Hemingway, author of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, certainly seem to hold this view, as evident by the fates of the major female characters in their respective works. The deviance of the major female characters in both works appears to corrupt not only themselves, but also pollute their partners, causing them to suffer injury

Reading Assignments Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Rat Kiley had told a story of a girl that was shipped to Vietnam and had stayed with them at the camp. Mary Anne Bell had begun as a normal innocent girl that slowly delved into herself and became one with the land disappearing into the forest. Tim O’Brien had uses many figurative language like imagery, “And yet at close range their faces showed the tension.” This shows that even when Mark Fossie and Mary Anne were at good standings, you could

Transformation in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, Tim O'Brien gives a dynamic example of how even the deep roots of ones culture can be modified. The focus is on the young lady, whose boyfriend manages to have her shipped over to Vietnam from the U.S. She is then thrown into a completely foreign culture that thousands of American GI's were experiencing. This change in culture affected the strongest and most skilled of America's ground troops. The affects on

What role does superstition and religion play in war? Explain using evidence from the text. Superstition and religion serve as emotional anchors for the soldiers, allowing them to have something to hold onto and to preserve their sanity in the midst of the violence and chaos that is all around them. An example of such a use for superstition and religion lies in Henry Dobbins and his girlfriend’s pantyhose. Dobbins uses the pantyhose as his “good-luck charm,” which gives him “access to a spiritual

In the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” a girl by the name of Mary Anne Bell arrives at a military compound. She used to be a civilian until she completely changed while spending time over at Vietnam. O’Brien uses imagery to enhance the story. Several examples of imagery are found in the chapter. One example is “To the north and west the country rose up in thick walls of wilderness, triple-canopied jungle, mountains unfolding into higher mountain…” (87). This quote gives the reader a vivid image

Imagery, detail, and symbolism play a crucial role in this work. Imagery has the function of painting a picture of the situation in the reader’s mind so that he or she is able to develop a version of the story individually. It makes the reading a more personalized experience that helps the reader to understand what’s going on. When O’Brien was just about to escape to Canada to avoid being drafted, he described the scene that was presented in front of him. “The shoreline was dense with brush and timber

change anyone. Now let's take a young, bright eyed women straight out of highschool and put her into a situation of warfare, a situation she has never experienced in her entire life or possibly even imagined. In Tim O’Brien’s short story “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” the main character Mary Anne “falls from innocence” and ultimately changes through curiosity,