O'Brien debunks male heroism in the novel. In "On the
Rainy River," he admits, "I was a coward, I went to war." He feels extreme guilt in
"The Man I Killed" and "In the Field" regarding Kiowa's
death.
Instead, he idealizes the role of females as his
ideal audience and, mythologically, as superior warriors (Mary Anne Bell) in the story
"The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong."
Tim O'Brien revisits
the female warrior, albeit an American, in Mary Anne Bell, a seventeen year-old
"blonde"..."kid"..."barely out of high school" who arrives in Vietnam wearing "white
culottes and a sexy pink sweater" (O'Brien 90). By the story's end, she becomes a
phantom Green Beret assassin wearing a "necklace of human tongues," "dangerous" and
"ready for the kill," a transformation that, according to the civilian reader seems
overly-dynamic, but in the context of Vietnam war mythology seems
plausible.
It is my contention that O'Brien intentionally
writes Mary Anne's story so full of fantasy that her transformation cannot be
rationalized by the (male) reader as much as intuited by the female (or at least
androgynous male) one. Intuition implies the spiritual, and Mary Anne's conversion is
certainly a mystical one, as she becomes the prototypical warrior, an uncommunicative
male who lives only for the hunt.
No comments:
Post a Comment