So, this man visited the campus of UMass-Amherst this week. For those of you who do not know who he is, his name is Tim O' Brien and he has written several works of fiction. The most famous of these novels is
which was a finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On a personal level, it also serves as one of my favorite books - ever. It is not an act of hyperbole to say that this book influenced the way I read and write, and I believe that many others have been similarly touched.
The book plays out as a series of vignettes about the Vietnam War told from the point of view of many characters. The war is presented as surreal and horrific, and many have claimed the book is an anti-war screed. However, Tim O' Brien has never really made that claim himself.
With such a background, he was clearly an intriguing choice to speak at a time when many are comparing the current conflict in Iraq to the Vietnam War - an unwinnable conflict that was undertaken for the wrong reasons.
However, he didn't criticize the Iraq war, at least, not directly. Instead, he just said: "War is a lot more complicated than any of us first believe - we must all reconsider the current conflict and all wars before coming to judgment. That, and nothing less, is your responsibility."
Such an attitude seems very gracious, considering the events in Vietnam and the current events in the Middle East and the sub-Asian continent. What do you all think?
2 comments:
I agree with Mr. O'Brien that, in general, wars are very complicated, and their inherent complexity requires more thought and reflection than what we can deduce from a 15-second soundbite on World News Tonight.
If anyone remembers O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, he himself, has great difficulty understanding the war, in fact, at one point, the protagonist, whom is a parallel of O'Brien's life, ponders the decision to enter the war or escape to Canada. But more importantly, the novel explains the hardships of war, and many concepts that are inconcievable to people who have not fought in war. With that in mind, for O'Brien to believe that it is our responsibility to judge the war, he is contradictiing himself partially because he made a clear point in his novel that one truly cannot understand war until they have been part of it themselves. However, O'Brien stays true to form by not voicing his own opinion, because as he has proven in his novel, it is impossibe for an outsider to understand the war, and to add to the lack of knowledge, the media's twists on the war only confuses the populace and further aggrivates people not only because they do not believe in what America is fighting for, but the lack of information that our country recieves through the media.
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