Blurred By Beauty

By Sam Gumprecht

Death blinded by sunlight, a body blurred by beauty and a soldier consumed by nature. These contrasts are examples of the stand out scenes in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried. In the book, he uses contrast to set off particularly harsh scenes about death and people in the war. By using this technique it makes those specific scenes stand out in readers minds. This uncommon use of contrast in describing traumatic situations gives readers a unique perspective on what he sees, and makes the scenes more emotionally stable rather than gruesome. The way O’Brien talks about the following scenes shows that the war is not simply evil but there is beauty in all bad.

The first scene that O’Brien uses this contrast in is the story of Mary Anne Bell. She is  young naive woman who goes to the Vietnamese jungle to see her boyfriend a soldier in O’Brien’s platoon. But she ends up gaining a whole new perspective by the end of the chapter. She ends up joining the group of green berets and going out into the jungle at night on raids. Instead of focusing on the fact that war took her innocence away and that she might never be the same again after this, O’Brien contrasts this. He softens it with vivid descriptions about how alive and connected to the jungle Mary Anne feels when she’s tip toeing on missions.

The second important scene O’Brien uses contrast in is the death of Curt Lemon. At this point in the story we know next to nothing about this young soldier, except for how he dies. O’Brien paints a scene of nature and the young naivety of Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon, messing around on a break in the battle. Readers can picture themselves dancing under the canopy of the jungle with the young men, it seems almost unimaginable what follows. The particular descriptions O’Brien chooses to focus on such as how the sunlight Lemon’s face, masks the traumatic event of the death. “ I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face… and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him.” (O’Brien). His specific choice in words keeps the readers focused the lightheartedness he felt before his death rather than the terrible details. By doing so O’Brien reinforces a feeling of surreality, that the death of Lemon didn’t seem real. As a reader you feel as if you are right there, unaware of the coming atrocity.

The third scene that he uses the contrast in is the chapter on the man he killed. The way O’Brien writes in this chapter and the discussion with Kiowa shows such emotion. The act of killing another human being is a shocking one to say the least and you would expect a scene dedicated to it would match the emotions felt. But it is surprisingly the opposite in the book. O’Brien provides a well written of the man he killed. He provides details of how he physically looked but continues on to write about who the man was, or at least who he imagines him to be. By putting so much personal detail into this gruesome scene, it blurs the bad. Instead of seeing the chaos and crazy that went into the death of the man, readers seem to envision a more peaceful scene. In his description O’Brien describes a literary juxtaposition of life and death. “ There was a butterfly on his chin” (O’Brien) he simply slides this delicate description in with the gorey details of death and the butterfly symbolizing life. By writing this scene this way it seems almost more real to readers. O’Brien could have been blunt and harsh with details about every moment of killing this man. But instead he coupled it with this heart felt description of a person not just a body.

By opposing these difficult memories with such opposite descriptions, the scenes seemed to pop out of the book more than the others. These scenes make an impact on what the readers take away from the book because of how compelling the contrast is. O’Brien strategically placed theses opposites in the book to show how war is not all simply dark but rather there is a light side to the dark you just have to pick it out.