If someone was going to tell me to read a book, I certainly was not going to pick up a book about some gruesome war. But hypothetically, say I had, twice; then which one would I say was better? The first, which goes by the name of The Things They Carried (by Tim O'Brien) , won a Pulitzer Prize for its "captivating account of the experiences of an infantry company in Vietnam...Evocative and haunting, the raw force of [a] confession" (says the Wall Street Journal). The second, called Mrs.Dalloway (by Virginia Woolf), "locates the enourmous within the everyday" (Michael Cunningham) and describes the homefront of an ending war.
However, Dalloway doesn't get praises for its exceedingly strong...war stories. Hidden within the thinly veiled quotes, Virginia Woolf threads "ideas" of the war into her tale with uses of words such as "boomed" (Woolf 5) and implications about a war veteran, Septimus, being diagnosed with PTSD. To put it frankly, this book is more about how time is paradoxical, being a crucial yet trivial part of our daily lives.
O'Brien, on the other hand, writes this story for the sole purpose of conveying the emotions from war to his audience. In fact, the major part of his story deals with the soldiers themselves, both in the war and after the war. For those who claim this story doesn't meld with the homefront as much as Mrs.Dalloway must reflect on how obvious the signals in Mrs.Dalloway are. O'Brien tells the reader upfront; this is exactly what they felt. It hits us with a frustrating anguish. However, Dalloway focuses on how the past influences the present, how little details from the war still exist in people's everyday lives. If not for the avid analysis, the message of war in Woolf's book could be belittled to a man who just has hallucinations caused by the disasters he has seen in the war.
So in the end, if I was actually going to pick up a war story just for the fun of it, I'd want to pick up one that told me upfront about the people who actually suffered, not the people who got the gentle after effects of those who had suffered.
However, Dalloway doesn't get praises for its exceedingly strong...war stories. Hidden within the thinly veiled quotes, Virginia Woolf threads "ideas" of the war into her tale with uses of words such as "boomed" (Woolf 5) and implications about a war veteran, Septimus, being diagnosed with PTSD. To put it frankly, this book is more about how time is paradoxical, being a crucial yet trivial part of our daily lives.
O'Brien, on the other hand, writes this story for the sole purpose of conveying the emotions from war to his audience. In fact, the major part of his story deals with the soldiers themselves, both in the war and after the war. For those who claim this story doesn't meld with the homefront as much as Mrs.Dalloway must reflect on how obvious the signals in Mrs.Dalloway are. O'Brien tells the reader upfront; this is exactly what they felt. It hits us with a frustrating anguish. However, Dalloway focuses on how the past influences the present, how little details from the war still exist in people's everyday lives. If not for the avid analysis, the message of war in Woolf's book could be belittled to a man who just has hallucinations caused by the disasters he has seen in the war.
So in the end, if I was actually going to pick up a war story just for the fun of it, I'd want to pick up one that told me upfront about the people who actually suffered, not the people who got the gentle after effects of those who had suffered.
Yup, I totally agree with you Ananya. Honestly, O'Brien, being a war veteran himself, is MUCH more capable of depicting the essence and reality of a devastating war (through the use of flashbacks, anachronism, multiple perspectives, and the before-during-and-after views of soldiers' lives). Woolf's main theme is time; war--or rather, merely the effects of it--is a subtopic.
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