Lucifer

This was my term paper in English 1080 at Memorial University in Newfoundland. I'm currently trying to re-write it (tying up some loose ends as my prof said), and I got a B on the original. Please be as harsh and honest as you like. The quotes are from "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll and "The Things They Carried" by Tim O' Brien.

Two works were published 115 years apart at the opposite ends of the literary spectrum. One is a poem; the other a short story of the war in Viet Nam. One is full of make believe words; the other is full of memories. One is a straightforward story of a hero setting out to destroy a monster; the other is a complicated tale of a group of men just trying to survive another day against overwhelming odds. “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll is the simple tale with the straightforward story. By contrast, Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is an involved tale of a war, the men in a platoon and the oppressive weight of the things they could not escape. The narrative tone in both stories shows that these two disparate stories are the same hero journey: the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, dragon-battle, abductions, dismemberment, tests, the resurrection, and the violence and the blood and the death and the power and the glory.

Brillig, slithy toves, jubjub and tulgey are words that Lewis Carroll invented and used for “Jabberwocky” because they had the right descriptive sound. The improbable hero sets out to destroy a monster he has only heard about at his father’s knee. Even though his father has admonished him to the dangers of the terrible beast, “The jaws that bite, the claws that catch” (86), the boy still takes up his keen and deadly blade and answers the call of adventure, to make his mark in the world. The nonsense words that Carroll uses to illustrate “Jabberwocky”, would not be out of place in the jungle in O’Brien’s Viet Nam, where death lurked in the underbrush, where a man could be whole and breathing and pissing one moment, and lifeless clay the next. The men in “The Things They Carried” are anti-heroes. They do not care about honour or glory; they did not set out on an adventure of their own free will. They were the chosen ones of their country, the sacrificial offering of their generation. Unlike the hero of “Jabberwocky” who takes his sword and seeks out the fearsome beast, these guys just want to go home.

In the circular adventure pictogram, the adventurer answers the call, and sets out on his quest. The fearsome and terrible beasts Carroll conjured to tempt his hero to adventure are the jabberwocky, the jubjub bird and the “frumious” bandersnatch. For protection against these enemies, the hero carried his “vorpal”(86) sword. The grunts in the jungle carry their modern day equivalents, the full panoply of destructive weapons: rifles, grenades, rockets, knives, explosives, as well as their own personal hedges against their dragons: slingshots, hatchets, and blackjacks. However, for these anti-heroes, their Jabberwocky will not come at them, “whiffling through the tulgey wood”(86), but take their lives unseen, by means of the sniper’s bullet or landmine.

Carroll’s hero sets out on a journey of unmentioned proportions, but it must have been daunting as he rests by the “Tumtum tree and stood a while in thought”(86); and just when he is sunk in “uffish thought[…]the Jabberwock, with eyes of flame”(86) appears. In Viet Nam, the weight of the jungle and the air and their guns made the men’s minds drift. Lt. Cross daydreams his days away, wishing himself walking on the Jersey shore “along the strip of sand, where things came together but also separated”(298) with his beloved Martha. It takes his own jabberwocky (the sniper shot that kills Ted Lavender) to snap him out of his reverie and into the now.

The threshold of adventure contains the crux of the adventure, the action, the meat, the battle with the dragon. In comparison with the men in the jungle, Carroll’s hero had it quick and easy: “And through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!”(86). For the men in the platoon, humping their weight and their worries through the steamy jungle, their jabberwocky is an intangible thing. It is the fear of the unknown: of the oppressive weight of the air and dirt and jungle and memories. It is the fear of the known: snipers and landmines and booby traps and tunnels and they do their best to hide it by acts of bravery or foolishness. They used their own special language to guard them against emotion and joked about being “greased, offed, lit up, zapped[…]”(306) in the hard callous way of men accustomed to dealing with death. They cut the thumbs from enemy corpses and carried them for good luck charms; they got stoned and threw away their rations and fired their weapons, killed chickens and dogs and set fires and destroyed villages, because they could exult in their bravado before their fear found them again.

Carroll’s hero kills his dragon, “and with it’s head, he went galumphing back.”(86) to the welcoming arms of his parent. The men in the jungle dream of freedom birds, brilliant silver eagles that will carry them, screaming back to the world, flying and laughing and soaring over the landscapes of their imaginations. For them the only release from their day to day grind is in their minds. The men, especially Lt. Cross, carry their dragons on the inside, burdens of memories, of lives not lived, regrets for things not done, parallel worlds where the war might never have happened, “romantic camping trips into the White Mountains”(294) or to the Jersey shore. For them, the flight, the return and the resurrection is something that they can only dream of until their tour of duty is over.

Both Carroll and O’Brien rely on the sheer incomparable vastness and the full descriptive ability of the English language, to project time and place. O’Brien uses lists and inventories and recitations to convey the weight and the experience and the terrible wonder of his war, where sudden and ugly death might be waiting for a reluctant hero around every corner. O’Brien’s litany of the facts of life under fire, come fast and furious, punching words like bullets directly into the soul of the reader:
“when they squealed or […]made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers”(305).

Carroll’s nonsense words and his simple style transport the reader into his gloomy wilderness inhabited by fearsome creatures of the reader’s own imagination and “imagination was a killer”(300), as the men waiting in the jungle knew best.

__________________
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
- Job 30:29

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ratbastid

What was the assignment? This seems like a fairly straightforward compare-and-contrast between two works, but I wonder how well it fits the question. My only real criticism of this paper is that its thesis ("Both works follow the heroic structure") isn't particularly profound. You could find hundreds or thousands of works that follow a similar arc--see Jos. Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces.

My Sophomore year I wrote a paper comparing the narrative structure of The Things They Carried to John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Both are novels masquerading as books of short stories. They're connected stories--almost a story cycle, in both cases, but both eject out of the cycle on a tangent. I think I got a B on that, come to think of it...

Lucifer

Now that sounds complicated. When I talk about the circular adventure pictogram, I'm referring to Joseph Campbells diagram from Hero with a 1000 faces. No, your right, the thesis isn't profound; I was just trying to compare and contrast the two most unlikely things that we had studied this semester. This was a basic first year English course, nothing fancy, the usual run of poetry, short stories, and Shakespeare.

__________________
I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
- Job 30:29

1123, 6536, 5321

ratbastid

Oh, gotcha. I didn't realize you'd studied Jabberwocky in the class. That draws the connection for me.