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.