Bitter Coffee

The one the most interesting parts of the Big Two-Hearted River is when Nick is talking about Hopkins and his story. I find this to be interesting not only because he has so much to say about Hopkins and how he makes coffee, but also because of how much we can get out of this little section on Hopkins.

Nick starts out talking about how he is honoring Hopkins through this coffee making. This gives me the immediate impression that Hopkins was a pretty great person and positively affected all of the people in their friend group. The fact that Nick and Hopkins had an argument over coffee also suggests that they were very good friends because they were having an argument about such a insignificant aspect of life. The next major statement we get about Hopkins is that he deserves the recognition from Nick. This gives me the impression that Hopkins died or something similar that he didn't deserve because he was such a great guy. Nick is again honor Hopkins with these statements reinforcing what he implied before.

Nick starts talking about how Hopkins was a very serious man. This came as a bit of a surprise to me as arguing about coffee would make one seem unconcerned with major things going on. Hopkins being serious still adds another layer to what we already know about him. He can be serious and as such he is depicted as an even better person.

After that Nick talks about Hopkins life. He says he was a rich man from playing polo and that he gave the people in their friend group something. The way Nick talks about Hopkins is very reminiscent and has a sort of sad feeling. This provides the reader with even more context about Hopkins as we understand the he was an invaluable part of the group and even when he gave the items to Nick and Bill to remember him by it seems like it was just enough to keep the memory alive.

The story ends with Hopkins disappearing. This concludes the picture that Nick is trying to create which presents Hopkins as a great person in terms of being both a friend and a nice person, how Hopkins can be serious but also laid back, and also leave a bit of mystery with the end of the story. Overall, just from what Nick recalls about Hopkins we can arrive at a pretty complete picture of what he was like.

The Juxtaposition of Linda's story with war stories

One of the most interesting stories in The Things They Carried is the last story. Not only does this story contain material that isn't really related to the war, but the story is interspersed with stories about the war. I think this juxtaposition affects both the stories about war and the story about Linda.

The story about Linda comes as a surprise after reading most of this book. O'Brien seems to write war stories where the plot doesn't really matter, as he says that much of it is not true, but what comes out of the situation does. In this story about young love and a child dying because of a tumor, I think the specifics do matter, as well as the fact that it supposedly happens to O’Brien himself.

The Story about Linda has many implications about how we read the war stories. One of the main characteristics of O’Brien throughout the book is that he doesn’t really play around with the dead, as some others do, and when the others do it he is sickened. I believe that his early experiences with death shape his views about how the dead should be treated. In the story about Linda, he is struck by how much the corpse of Linda is different from how she actually was. The bloating of the body as well as the stillness that he just wasn’t used to all provide a stark contrast to what she was like when she was alive. I believe this knowledge of the changes to the body after death makes him dislike the behavior because he thinks that the families may not be able to recognize the bodies, they might even decompose, and the soldiers basically playing with the bodies is not really a good way for the bodies to last be seen.

Reading all of the war stories prior to the story about Linda also changes how I view that story. The first way in which the story is influenced is how you can doubt how truthful the story is. The large amount of discussion in the book about how war stories don’t need to be factual to get the message across, and in some cases can’t be factual because what happens is way out there, leads us to question almost every story in the book including the one about Linda. I hope that the story is true as it would seem like betrayal to write this moving story about his childhood love, which was supposedly real, and then have it all be fiction. Even if the truth of the story doesn’t matter O’Brien also raises the point about how war stories don’t have morals but the story about Linda has a clear moral stated at the beginning. This raises the issue of whether the story about Linda is a war story or not.

The question of whether Linda’s story is a war story or not seems complicated in the sense that the story comes out of a war situation  but other than that it doesn’t really seem to have a large connection to war. I’ll leave you with this question: is the story about Linda a war story or not?