Research on Robert Olen Butler
The majority of published literature in the US derived from the Vietnam War primarily has a base focus on effects the war experience had on Americans, and on the American culture and psyche. However, Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning, "A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain," as well as many other critically acclaimed publications has been recognized for "breaking the mold" of traditional war writers by constructing his narratives in the first person voices of the Vietnamese. In order for an American write to compose stories through the perspective of individuals from a culture considered so foreign from our own he would have to have accumulated a significant amount of experience and knowledge for his works to be considered legitimate. Butler himself is well versed in the Vietnamese language, has voluntarily participated in the Vietnam War as a translator, and has taught in a predominately Vietnamese American area. The question at hand is; do these facts alone allow his stories to be admissible as authentic works?
Robert Olden Butler was born in 1944 and grew up in the small steel mill town of Granite City, Illinois. (Butler 526) He was the only child father who was a retired actor and former chairperson of the theater department at St. Louis University, and a mother who was a retired executive secretary? (Layman 4) In a 1993 interview, Butler said "It was second nature for us to talk late into the night about books, movies, and theater." (Stowers 202) After completing grade school, Butler attended Granite City High School where he became class president and co-valedictorian in 1963. Butler attended Northwestern University and graduated suma cum loude in 1967. Once completing graduate school with an MFA in play righting Butler suspected he would be drafted into the military.
In Christmas 1910, Robert Butler uses plot and character to reflect on the setting of the short story. The setting takes place in her third Christmas in the west river country, which is described as a bad, hopeless and depressing place. There is nothing there but flat lands everywhere. There is nothing better for Abigail to do to make her life better there, so she just has to do what her parents do. The areas around them are even desolated. Due to droughts, it makes South Dakota lonely and go through some hard times. The winter makes it hard for people to interact with other people. Abigail needs her own character, she wants attention from people that are not her family. The weather where they live is not your typical ideal weather, Abigail
Summary of the Case On August 1987, Donald Butler opened a store in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called the “Avenue Boutique”. In this store, Butler sold and rented pornographic publications that were considered “hard core” and sexual paraphernalia. A couple weeks later, the City of Winnipeg Police searched and seized Butler’s sexually explicit materials lawfully. From this, Butler was charged with 173 counts under s. 163 of the Criminal Code. These charges included s. 163(1)(a) which criminalizes the distribution and the possession for distribution of obscene materials, as wells s. 163(2)(a) for selling and exposing obscene material to the public.
Neilson, Jim. Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1998
Raymond, Michael W. "Imagined Responses to Vietnam: Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. Critique 24 (Winter 1983).
Robert Olen Butler Robert Olen Butler, Jr., was born January 20, 1945, and grew up in Granite City, Illinois, a steel town near St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Robert Olen Butler, Sr., was chair of the theater department at St. Louis University, and his mother, Lucille Hall Butler, an executive secretary. Butler graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in oral interpretation. He went on to the University of Iowa, receiving his M.A. in playwriting in 1969. While in Iowa, he married, and then divorced Carol Supplee. When Butler finished graduate school he enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to Military Intelligence, given intensive training in the Vietnamese language, and sent to Vietnam. Butler’s “professional proficiency” was gained in a year’s immersion course, taught by a Vietnamese exile who also gave him insight into the Vietnamese culture and the struggles of an exile. His tour of duty was served in Saigon until 1972. It is felt by many that his war time training and experiences deeply influenced his life, writing, and thinking. In July 1972, he married the poet Marilyn Geller and worked as an editor and reporter in New York City for a year. When his wife became pregnant with their son, Joshua, the family moved back to Illinois. Butler taught as a substitute in his hometown of Granite City in 1973 and 1974, then became a reporter in Chicago. He moved back to the New York City area in 1975 and took a job as editor-in-chief of Energy User News, an investigative newspaper he created. According to Butler, every word of his first four published novels was written on a legal pad, by hand, on his lap, on the Long Island Railroad as he commuted back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan. In 1985, Butler assumed an assistant professorship at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Louisiana is home to several Vietnamese communities, and the Louisiana Vietnamese provided Butler with material for his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Butler once said that he finds that much fiction about Vietnam fails to portray the Vietnamese people with sufficient depth, perhaps because it focuses more on the military action. His early work is dominated by the “Vietnam trilogy,” novels in which a minor character in one shows up as a major character in another.
The United States became frustrated with the death of wounded prisoners in Vietnam War. This is so deleterious John F Kennedy sends a warning to the west. Tim O’Brien Story about Vietnam could have been a biography because he played a role and it is based on a somewhat a true Story. O’Brien didn’t go through with this because of what he wrote is what he did see, what could have happened, and what he kept from being told. In the book simple themes guilt, shame, and innocence play a vital role in the soldier’s life.
Tim O’ Brien’s narrative, How to Tell a War Story depicts the livelihood and experience of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. More so evaluating the life Tim O’ Brien and several other characters in his platoon. The sequences of stories reveals the thoughts and behavior of many post-Vietnam veterans and also can be related to the behavior of many veterans today. Throughout the segments of stories, “How to tell a War Story”, “Speaking of Courage and Notes”, and “The Things They Carried”, O’ Brien illustrates a common theme of guilt and sacrifice among the key characters Lieutenant Cross, Rat, and O’ Brien himself. Each character are presented with an unexpected responsibility and are forced to serve their state. A sense of discomfort
Fellers, Carla A. "What A Wonderful World": The Rhetoric Of The Official And The Unofficial In Good Morning, Vietnam." War, Literature & The Arts: An International Journal Of The Humanities 17.1/2 (2005): 232-241. Academic Search Premier. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.
The impact of the Vietnam War upon the soldiers who fought there was huge. The experience forever changed how they would think and act for the rest of their lives. One of the main reasons for this was there was little to no understanding by the soldiers as to why they were fighting this war. They felt they were killing innocent people, farmers, poor hard working people, women, and children were among their victims. Many of the returning soldiers could not fall back in to their old life styles. First they felt guilt for surviving many of their brothers in arms. Second they were haunted by the atrocities of war. Some soldiers could not go back to the mental state of peacetime. Then there were soldiers Tim O’Brien meant while in the war that he wrote the book “The Things They Carried,” that showed how important the role of story telling was to soldiers. The role of stories was important because it gave them an outlet and that outlet was needed both inside and outside the war in order to keep their metal state in check.
A collection of essays by Andrew Lam called “Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora refers to the struggles of a Vietnamese national living abroad. “A good scent from a Strange Mountain: Stories by Robert Olen Butler is fifteen short stories that relate to the immigration from Vietnam in the 1970’s to the southeastern U.S. state of Louisiana. In these two novels there seems to be one major idea of community among Vietnamese immigrants. In Butler’s novel the women in the Mr. Green short story is Catholic and was from Hanoi. She lives in Versailles, Louisiana and she states that there is “the garden on the bank of the bayou that runs through this place they call Versailles; it is part of New Orleans, but is far from the center of town and it is full of Vietnamese who once came from the North” (Butler 24). This was a popular garden that the Vietnamese community shared. The Vietnamese community was showing their presence in Louisiana and creating awareness to the American born population. Andrew Lam’s novel states that he was “Old enough to remember Vietnam, I was also young enough to embrace America, and to be shaped by it.”( Lam, 121) In an article that discusses Hurricane Katrina’s affect on Vietnamese communities it was said “The Vietnamese were among the first to return to begin rebuilding their neighborhoods, giving momentum to rebuilding efforts in the East and the rest of the city. Many Vietnamese feel the experience has brought the community even closer together.” ("Vietnamese History in New Orleans") Although immersion to American culture is important to obtain financial, social and education needs, Vietnamese still gain great pride in their past history and
Wallace Terry has collected a wide range of stories told by twenty black Vietnam veterans. The stories are varied based on each experience; from the horrific to the heart breaking and to the glorified image of Vietnam depicted by Hollywood. Wallace Terry does not insinuate his opinion into any of the stories so that the audience can feel as if they are having a conversation with the Vietnam Veteran himself. Terry introduces the purpose of the book by stating, “ Among the 20 men who portray their war and postwar experiences in this book. I sought a representative cross section of the black combat force.”(p. XV) Although the stories in this book were not told in any specific order, many themes became prominent throughout the novel such as religion, social, and health.
When looking back at a war as controversial as America's involvement in Vietnam, it is difficult to understand why soldiers would choose to fight and why they kept fighting for so long. Through a series of letters written by the soldiers themselves, one can see multiple motivations for soldiers in Vietnam, such as believing in the cause, self-preservation, and comradary amongst the men. This is all brought together in Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam, an adequate volume edited by Bernard Edelman for the New York Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission.
59 year old John Glover Roberts Jr, was born on January 27, 1955 in Buffalo, New York. He was the only son of John G. “Jack” Glover Sr. and Rosemary Podrasky Roberts. His ancestry was Irish, Welsh, and Czech (O'Dowd). In 1959 his family moved to Long Beach, Indiana where he attended first, a Catholic Elementary School (Notre Dame), and then a private Catholic boarding school (La Lumiere in La Porte, Indiana). John then entered Harvard with aspirations of becoming a history professor.
The Vietnam War was a controversial conflict that plagued the United States for many years. The loss of life caused by the war was devastating. For those who came back alive, their lives were profoundly changed. The impact the war had on servicemen would affect them for the rest of their lives; each soldier may have only played one small part in the war, but the war played a huge part in their lives. They went in feeling one way, and came home feeling completely different. In the book Vietnam Perkasie, W.D. Ehrhart describes his change from a proud young American Marine to a man filled with immense confusion, anger, and guilt over the atrocities he witnessed and participated in during the war.
Butler was one of many to be accused of a crime he didn’t commit. In 1993, a woman got