In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, a character named Mary Ann is introduced as the girlfriend of Vietnam soldier Mark Fossie. Even more so than the other American soldiers in Vietnam, Mary Ann is the embodiment of an outsider, in some sense, just like the soldiers. She is also the representation of American naivety in the Vietnam War. She does not belong there, and her story accentuates what happens when someone’s surroundings affect him or her. She arrives to Vietnam as Mark Fossie’s girlfriend, and she is the only tangible example of love in the novel. Mary Ann gets there dressed in her pink sweater and her white culottes, with a fresh face and a very curious personality. She wants to know about everything. She is the perfect representation …show more content…
She does what she wants, without worrying about Mark Fossie being concerned about her whereabouts. She might have realized that she couldn’t be who he wanted her to be anymore. Mary Ann can be considered a selfish person all throughout the novel. She is also not able to respond and negotiate with other people emotionally. Even after Mary Ann has the talk with Mark, she is just distant and in the end decides to do what she wishes to do and leaves him. She is very motivated by her emotions. Everything Mary Ann does is influenced by her feelings. She’s sucked into Vietnam, and she ultimately can’t leave, she doesn’t want to, because of the way it makes her feel. Learning about the country isn’t good enough for her, she feels the need to understand and gather information about it through experience, and she eventually slips away from the soldiers and disappears through the …show more content…
One of these moments is when she has a talk with Mark Fossie and decides to go back to “normal” in order to make him happy. Her moral nature motivates this action, and it says about her that she truly cares about Mark. In the end, her unstable personality overrides this moment of emotional weakness and goes back to what she was becoming. Mary Ann undergoes a drastic moral and emotional change through a gradual process. The girl that arrives at Vietnam wouldn’t have been able to hunt and kill without a second thought, much less enjoy it. Maybe it was in her character all along, it was just never challenged, but in the end all of this does happen. Mary Ann is a round character, and she has a complex temperament. She starts off being a sweet and loving girl that every soldier grows fond of. Then she ends up being crazy about killing, and obsessed with Vietnam. Yet, in this transition, she is still in love with Mark Fossie, but unlike when she got there, her motivation now isn’t
Mary Anne was introduced in one of Rat Kiley’s stories. Mark Fossie had been dating her since the sixth grade and even had plans of marriage, so one day she showed up to war. She started the war very innocent and curious. She wore a pink sweater and was very friendly (89). By the end of the war, she was a completely different person. She had turned into a “greenie” at war. Eddie had even found her with a human tongue necklace (105). One day Mary Anne disappeared. Some even say she is now a part of the land, and that she crossed to the other side (110). Mary Anne is introduced to show the audience how much war can actually change a person. The things that the men see and experience during the war can make them a completely different person. War can make people lose themselves. Mary Anne proved this. I also feel that being in a new place that you have never been, can make you realize something what you really love. This was also the case for Mary Anne. She had never experienced anything like the war, so after being a part of it, I think that she had a thrill from it. This can also relate to many people today. Often times when someone goes into college or another chapter of their life, they realize thing that they enjoy, without even knowing. Mary Anne had discovered a part of her life that she loved, without
Anne Frank: The Biography, by Melissa Muller, proves that Goodrich and Hackett are not justified in using dramatic license in The Diary of Anne Frank because they changed the character roles, removed the emotions of the SS officer, and removed the characters from the play from real life.
The Things They Carried Women and their Role in The Things They Carried Within the book The Thing’s They Carried, the stories of the male soldiers and their dealings with the Vietnam War. However, he also delves into the stories of the women and how they affected the soldiers and their experiences in Vietnam. While the men dealt with the horrors of war, the women were right at their side, just not in as much of a public view as the male soldiers. O’Brien uses women such as Martha, Linda and Kathleen in The Things They Carried to punctuate how vital remembrance and recompense was to him and other soldiers in Vietnam.
Mary Anne Bell is a character who was sent to Vietnam for a purpose. It seemed as if Mary Anne was the one that would be the one who would support Mark Fossie and better yet, to get married while they were in Vietnam so that their childhood dreams would come true. The war is something and somewhere that can make a person experience 180 changes. It seems as if Mary Anne Bell’s a person who’s lost her cute personality after she was just too involved with the war that was going on. It has been said that a war can truly change a person so much that they can lose all their old characteristics or better yet, their appearance.
Shakespeare specifically leaves out key details on her character. Was she in an affair with Claudius before the murder? Does she know Claudius was the one to kill King Hamlet? Did she plot with him?
Thomas Pringle wrote "The idea of Mary Prince's history was first suggested by herself. She wished it to be done, she said, that good people in England might hear from a slave what a slave had felt and suffered.” Mary Prince, was the first black woman to have her story published in Britain. Due to Mary Prince’s graphic detail, her anecdotes were sadistic to the extent that very few believed her . Mary Prince conveys that both slave owners and their slaves suffer physical and emotional effects of slavery, confirming Pringle’s write that "slavery is a curse to the oppressors scarcely less than the oppressed; it's natural tendency is to brutalize both.”
All soliders had arrived with some form innocence in them that had been destroyed and changed within a few weeks. The change in Mary Anne makes readers so much more aware that the change for even a man was not as ordinary as our minds would like it to seem. We want to think that were there for our protection and put their mental strain in the backs of our minds lest we feel some remorse. When they found Mary Anne she had joined the ranks of the Greenies, the fiercest group of army warriors. She had found a new part of her; you could no longer see the glimpses of innocence.
The novel “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’ Brien takes place in the Vietnam War. The protagonist, Lieutenant Cross, is a soldier who is madly in love with a college student named Martha. He carries around photos and letters from her. However, the first few chapters illustrate how this profound love makes him weak in the war.
Mark Fossie arranges a way to get his girlfriend down to Nam and a big change happens. Fossies girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, was straight out of high school only seventeen years old. Once she gets there Fossie is the happiest man on earth. Just watching her dance and goof around making him get a grin on her face. She starts to hang around all the men and having a good time. Mary Anne begins to act a little more like the troops by not being afraid to get dirty and become a stronger fearless woman. She goes out with them into the woods, learns how to disassemble and shoot an M16, and to feed/hunt on her own. Then she starts acting less and less like the girl Fossie met on the first day Mary Anne came to visit. In the novel O’Brien says “her body seemed foreign somehow- too stiff in places, too firm where the softness used to be. The bubbliness was gone. The nervous giggling, too. When she laughed now, which was rare, it was only when something struck her as truly funny.” (O’Brien 94-95) which is showing how much the atmosphere there has changed her. War has changed her. The hot days, dirty jobs, and around all the dangerous forest area that could hold the enemies. She is becoming distant of Fossie and a whole new different person. O’Brien also says “In the evenings, while the men played cards, she would sometimes fall into long elastic silence, her eyes fixed on the dark, her arms folded, her foot tapping out a code message against the floor.” Which also shows she had changed. More distant and almost gives off a lost feeling in her eyes. She begins to come back really late at night and sometimes not coming back at all. In the end Mark Fossie approaches her after listening to her beautiful singing and tries to figure out why she has change or why she almost seems to have no interest in him anymore. She
Of all the literary lenses, one would not think that feminism would be a prevalent topic in a war novel. In Tim O’Brien’s iconic book, The Things They Carried, the idea that women were just as important as men acts an important theme, however from a different perspective. Movies and epic war stories tell of the heroic actions of the World’s finest: bulky men with an appetite for battle. Yet, there always lied a backbone. Comfort, inspiration, ease, all things that women provided to soldiers during any war. Yet, sometimes things did not go as planned and rash actions were made. O’Brien’s masterful use of lenses creates an interesting novel, one that will stand the test of time, however, the aspects of the feminist lens provides much insight into the inner lying meanings of the book, mostly in the areas of characters, objects of importance, and the role of gender in the Vietnam War.
Mary Anne is initially introduced to the audience, narrated by Rat Kiley, as an innocent and naïve young woman present in Vietnam solely to visit her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. She arrives in “white culottes” and a “sexy pink sweater” (86), and is deemed by the other soldiers as no more than a happy distraction for her man. As Mary Anne settles in though, her abundant curiosity of Vietnam and the war heighten, and she soon enough possesses as much interest in the war as many of the men. Forward, Mary Anne’s transformation into a soldier begins as she leaves her sweet femininity behind. No longer caring for her vanity, she falls “into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, [and] cut her hair short” (94). Mary Anne’s lost femininity is also evident when she handles powerful rifles like the M-16. Not only does the weapon literally scream out masculi...
Mary Anne did not truly become ‘dark’, because to her this is not a story about war; this is a story about a woman attempting to overcome gender roles and the inability of men to accept it. When Mary Anne begins interacting with the land and the material culture of war we are introduced to her curious nature. She would “listen carefully” (91) and was intrigued by the land and its mystery. Vietnam was like Elroy Berdahl to her in the beginning in that it did not speak, it did not judge, it was simply there. Vietnam saved Mary Anne’s life.
Geoffrey Chaucer is, to this day, one of the most famous Middle-English writers. His view of corrupt societies and how things "may not always be as they seem" was incredibly accurate and has even carried over its accuracy into the modern era. His writings are highly controversial and bring out the faults in the most conservative aspects of society—especially when it comes to sexism and the church. In The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer, he speaks about 31 people going on a pilgrimage. The entire selection is heavily weighted and based on one key thing, which is how it is structured. The entire story is split up into sections which entails many to call it a "story within a story." Better yet, it is more accurately described as stories
In Daisy Miller, Henry James slowly reveals the nature of Daisy"s character through her interactions with other characters, especially Winterbourne, the main character." The author uses third person narration; however, Winterbourne"s thoughts and point of view dominate." Thus, the audience knows no more about Daisy than Winterbourne." This technique helps maintain the ambiguity of Daisy"s character and draws the audience into the story.
Near the middle of the story we see Mary exhibit her bad sinister character; her personality and feelings suddenly change when she murders her own husband by hitting him at the back of the head with a frozen lamb leg. After denying all of Mary’s helpful deeds, Patrick told her to sit down so that he can tell her something serious; the story doesn’t tell us what he says to her but Mary suddenly changes after he tells her something, her “instinct was not to believe any of it” (Dahl 2). She just responded with “I’ll get the supper” (Dahl 2) and felt nothing of her body except for nausea and a desire to vomit. She went down the cellar, opened the freezer, grabbed a frozen leg of lamb, went back upstairs, came behind Patrick, and swung the big leg of lamb as hard as she could to the back of his head killing him. This act of sudden violence shows how much she has gone ...