D-U-N!!!!!

The authors of A Valediction and Conjoined have polar opposite views on the essence of love, but similar ideas on how it is constructed. The figurative language in these poems, such as the imagery, serve to set the conflicting tones each author takes while at the same time giving the reader a similar picture of two people put together as one. On one hand, Donne finds the beauty in love while Minty stresses the unnatural state of marriage, but both describe it as a conjoined entity where two people are inexorably bound.
A Valediction relies on lighter tones and images to present love in a joyful tone while the imagery in Conjoined is dark and unnatural. Words like "joys", "airy", and "sublunary" give Donne's poem a sense of weightlessness, as if love had no burden as if on a different plane of existence. His focus is more in the soul of the lovers than their physical states, stating that "Our two souls, which are one." Instead of having a connection of the tangible kind, lovers have an ethereal connection the each other. By presenting love in this way, it is given a heavenly quality. However, Minty's poem Conjoined paints an entirely different view of love, or at least marriage. Words like "accident", "freaks", and "doomed" describe Minty's outlook on marriage, an unnatural tortured state of being . There is also no choice in the marriage Minty describes, with the two souls just being forced together. While the typical societal view of marriage much more closely resembles the descriptions of Donne, Minty doesn't even address the subject of love in marriage. Instead, Marriage is likened to a "two-headed calf" with "one body fighting to suck at its mother's teats." This twisted image exemplifies marriage as seen by Minty, two identities forced to live together and fight for what little identity there is for to be shared between the two of them. Each of her examples describe a physical connection between the anomalies, not the spiritual ones that are present in A Valediction. there is nothing but an outward appearance of constriction, which doesn't enter the spiritual essence of love. Two souls in one body causes a conflict in the being rather than opening up an opportunity for the souls to become one. Instead of the "airy" love, Minty describes the lovers movements as "heavy" which insinuates that it is a burden for the union to continue to take place, far from easy or simple. The torture of love in Minty's world conflicts almost everything that Donne had described, giving two very different descriptions of the composition of love.
Though these two authors differ in these many aspects, they show a similarity in how love comes to be. Both of the authors describe lovers as two beings becoming one entity. Donne refers to the lovers as a compass that move as the other hand moves, neither being completely free or independent from the other party. Minty refers to "Chang and Eng", a deformed double onion, and a "two-headed calf" as examples of the connectivity of husband and wife. Both of these poems relay love as a loss as a single identity in return for the creation of a new one that envelopes both parties. Neither has the ability to break away from their significant other, and both must live following the whims of the other half.Donne states, "If they be two, they are two so/ as stiff compasses are two;/ thy soul, thy fixt foot, makes no show/ to move, but doth, if th'other do." There is a lack of control if the lovers wanted to go their own way, but that isn't much of a consideration in A Valediction. However, while Donne's lovers must "obliquely run" Minty's are "fighting" instead. The obligations of love are welcomed in Donne's case, but dreaded in Minty's. Also, the object of separation, or at least the object of not being able to separate is addressed in both the poems. In A Valediction, Donne writes that, "when the other far doth roam,/ it [the other person] leans and harkens after it" while in Conjoined, the lovers, "cannot escape each other" even if they wanted to. On one hand, separation is a sad occurrence, and on the other it is an impossibility. Though the way love is viewed by each author is very different, their description of what it actually is similar.
Every simile Minty uses stresses the pain and monstrosity of conjoining two people, while the images in Donne's poem accentuates the beauty in it. Both poems define love as two different people forming into a single identity, an identity that is nearly impossible to split once it is formed. The author's views on this subject, however couldn't be more different. To Donne, Love is a happy connection of two souls, but to Minty the combination of souls is a crime against nature.

Criticism

Okay, I'm going to be honest here guys. I had a hard time following that article from start to finish for some reason, so if I seem off base in my response you know why. The author of this article seems to criticize Tim O'Brien for making his stories too centered while passing up an opportunity to educate people about the wide reaching effects of the Vietnam war. Neilson stated, "O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese." Because of this severe oversight, Neilson says that O'Brien's stories do not give any valid knowledge to the public about the controversy and, "largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." I had very much overlooked this in my first reading of the text, but I can now kind of see where Neilson is coming from. O'Brien sells his book as though it was a way to somehow capture the intangible nature of the war but refusing to try and capture the truth, but The Things They Carried is really a one man show. It is not free of the 'ethnocentric' views of the war making no better than any other war story out there. Though these are all good points that Neilson makes, I tend to disagree that The Things They Carried doesn't achieve O'Brien's purpose. Yes, he mostly ignores the plight of the Vietnamese people there, but he has no experience of that side of the war. O'Brien is writing what he knows of the war, what any typical American soldier would know of that war. To give much more to the Vietnamese would be contradictory to the rest of his novel. The only truth he knew was what he experienced and that is all he wrote. Neilson wants O'Brien's work to be something it's not- a history book that does outline all those "causes and consequences of the war."

The Things They're Talking about

The Things they carried is, for lack of a better designation, is a war story. Not the traditional kind where every brave loyalist is a hero and every cowardly foreigner is a bloodthirsty enemy just waiting to be vanquished by the Patriotic and Just warrior. “On occasion the war is like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.” (pg. 32)No, these soldiers are human. And because they are human and this story is portrayed as a true war story, any story told will have a lack of the warm fuzzy morals that we have come to expect from war stories. "If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." Chapter 6, pg. 68. Ultimately we are not supposed to gleam any sort of meaning from Tim O’Brien’s stories, but we are supposed to find the lack of meaning in them. The collections of stories seem more like an episodic, fractured, diary. There is no continuous plots or consistent timeline (like when they talk about who will die later). "It's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true." Chapter 7, pg. 82. The truth is found in the emotions, not in the accuracy of the facts. There is no way for anyone who has not been in a war situation to understand the plain facts, when what truly happens is so far out of our normal reality. So, in order to complete our understanding, the reality needs to be augmented in a way that it is exempt from the influences of all those Heroic war stories and history books to broken down to the pure emotions.

Postmodernism

Here's what Postmodernism reminds me of: Big Daddy Modernism established all the rules, stereotypes, and facts and now sulky teenager Postmodernism refuses to conform to this standard. Everyone is an individual, forming their own perceptions that shape their personal reality. Postmodernism lashes out at the idea that any one ideal, or metanarrative, can define the infinite numbers of realities or truths. Therefore, by labeling people according to any sort of metanarative, you are marginalizing the many intricate narratives that actually compose that person. Basically, it is impossible to define anything by one truth because everyone has a different definition. There can be no absolute truths because there is no possible way to account for the different perceptions. Metanarratives like religion, stereotyping, and science, suffer in the Postmodern world. The only reality we have access to is our own, and we should not in any way try and impose our reality on anyone else. These Metanarratives try to establish a center in society, a uniform ideal to which all can conform, but Postmodernism claims we live in a centerless society where all the different narratives coexist as all the cultures mingle. Trying to find a single center is futile in our current society because everyone is influenced in radically different ways. As one quote I found said, "There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything," (Twyla Tharp). Postmodernism negates the central structure of the modern world, reducing its certralistic ideals into a mere fallacy. There are too many variables to be accounted for, and a society with a center means a society without individuals. As long as there are independant minds, there is no chance for a center to dominate nor is there any need for one to.