Meyer tells us that “Theme is the central idea of a story. It provides a unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of a story are organized”(246). The theme of a literary work is similar to a thesis in expository writing. Theoretically, all the ideas in an expository paper should support the thesis. We also know from our own writing experience that developing the thesis statement is perhaps the single most difficult part of the writing process. It often requires a number of revisions as we work with our ideas to make them coherent. Literary works are usually more subjective than the writing we do in college. Authors are artists who explore the complexities of our lives by telling stories about how things actually happen or how they should happen. Even the writer may not be able to state the theme of a story because he or she may be focused on telling the story rather than explaining its meaning. For this reason, a literary work may have implications that are more far reaching than the author intended.
You may have noticed that my views of the story presented in previous sections do not necessarily agree with what Faulkner said in the interview. His view of the story is based on his experience writing the story, and his experience living in the South in the first part of the 20th century. Like many Americans, Faulkner believes that Miss Emily bears the responsibility for her own actions. He sees her conflict as a struggle between good and evil: God and Satan. But, artists are observers. They write what they see and hear whether they understand it completely at the time or not. Faulkner writes the story from the point of view of the townspeople, giving us a very clear view of their influence on Miss Emily’s life. He also provides details in the plot that indicate Miss Emily has serious psychological problems. I believe these are mitigating factors, but my view has been shaped by advances in psychology and sociology as well as historical events like the Viet-Nam War that have made us examine the role of the individual and the role of society and government in much different ways than Faulkner viewed them.
There is no one correct answer in matters of literary analysis and interpretation. Your ideas about the theme of a work may vary from the author’s, the professor’s, and your classmate’s. What is important is how closely and carefully you examine the details of the work to support your ideas.
The final paper will involve examining the theme of In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien. Novels like full length plays usually have more complex plots, more extensive character development, more elaborate use of settings, and more thematic development than short stories and poetry. A novelist may have a central theme in mind as well as a number of themes that are interrelated or support a central theme. In order to determine the theme, we need to examine the other elements of fiction and analyze how they contribute to the central idea.
Novels often have more than a single plot line. The main plot in In the Lake of the Woods focuses on the mysterious disappearances of Kathy and John Wade. This main plot deals with their stay at the cottage after John’s defeat in the senate primary, Kathy’s disappearance, the search, and John’s disappearance. Other plot lines include John’s early life, John and Kathy’s courtship and marriage, John’s service in Viet-Nam, and John’s political career. In addition, there are a number of chapters called “Evidence” that contain interviews, exhibits, and references to other texts. Finally there are several chapters called “Hypothesis” that present possible scenarios of what happened to Kathy and John.
The plot is not structured in chronological order. The novel begins with a chapter called “How
Unhappy They Were” which deals with John and Kathy’s last days together at the
Why does O’Brien use this method of story telling? We remember Faulkner used a similar method in
“A Rose for Emily.” The fact that they
events are told out of sequence helps to create mystery and suspense. It focuses our attention on the significance
of the events rather than the order of the events, and it gives us a chance to
understand the characters before we judge them.
We would be less likely to sympathize with Miss Emily had we known she
was a necrophiliac from the beginning of the
story. We also might have acted like the
electorate had we known that John Wade took part in the
O’Brien’s method is more complex than Faulkner’s, however. The main plot is told in chronological order, but it is interrupted by chapters that provide background information, evidence, and hypotheses. These chapters, which may seem confusing at first, help us to see the events of the main plot in greater depth and from different perspectives. Each piece of evidence is a story in itself; each hypothesis an explanation of the story. Eventually, we may find that all the pieces of the story are interconnected, or we may find that the pieces of the story work more like a kaleidoscope so that each time we examine the story, the pieces fit together differently to form a new picture. Ultimately, how we view the plot will influence how we view the theme.
Theme is also directly related to the main characters, Kathy and John. Their relationship is at the center of the novel. It is important to note, however, that O’Brien develops John more fully, and he also devotes more time to John and Kathy’s relationship than he does to Kathy’s character. Much of the information in the “Evidence” chapters relates to John rather than Kathy. In addition, much of the information in the supporting plots has to do with John’s childhood and Viet-Nam service. Kathy’s character is developed in the main plot, the chapters dealing with their relationship, and in the “Hypothesis” chapters. The narrator also looks more deeply into John’s mind than into Kathy’s.
John is an extremely complex character. The death of his father, his love of magic, his relationship with Kathy, his Viet-Nam service, and his political career are all interconnected. The novel begins by focusing on Kathy and John’s relationship. John’s loss in the primary has had a devastating affect of their relationship. They try bravely to pretend that their relationship is the most important thing, but it is clear that their dreams, especially John’s dreams, have been destroyed. The third chapter, “The Nature of Loss” focuses on the death of John’s father. “At the funeral he wanted to kill everybody…” including his father. John would also pretend that his father was not dead, or he would invent elaborate stories about how he saved his father. This chapter establishes a pattern of behavior that John uses to cope with loss. His need for love, his love of magic, his love for Kathy, his need to change the world though politics, the murder of innocent civilians at My Lai, his post traumatic stress disorder are all intensified by the death of his father.
Kathy’s character is not developed as extensively as John’s. Although a number of characters in the book see John as a mysterious character, Kathy may be the most mysterious character in the novel. We know that John’s love for Kathy is motivated in part by his deep need for love. His behavior toward her, however, is strange. He spies on her, following her around campus all times of the day and night. When he returns from Viet-Nam, he does not go directly to her, but spies on her, only to discover that she has spent the night with someone else. His behavior can be understood in terms of his need for control. Her behavior, however, is not as easy to explain. She knows that he follows her but is flattered by it on some level. She fears him, as she explains in her letters to him in Viet-Nam. She apparently had affairs with other people while he was away, and she has an affair with a dentist while they are married. O’Brien, however, does not provide any background information to explain her behavior. It is only possible to speculate that she is attracted and repelled by his dual nature much like many of the other characters in the story.
Kathy and John’s relationship is central to the novel. Like the two characters, their relationship is complex. They seem to love each other, but there is much that is hidden and mysterious about their relationship. John, for example, hides his experiences in Viet-Nam from her, a fact that leads to his defeat in the Senate primary and the end of their relationship. There is much in their relationship that is based on self-interest rather than mutual love and respect. John requires that Kathy sacrifice her dreams for his political career. Kathy seems to have no say in the matter, but it is clear that she regrets not having had children and that she blames John. John’s loss in the primary causes the marriage to unravel, an indication that the marriage was in trouble long before the primary.
The reasons why John and Kathy’s relationship disintegrates and ends in tragedy also contribute to the theme.
The
“There were many trees, mostly pine
and birch, and there was the dock and the boat house and the narrow dirt road
that came through the forest and ended in polished gray rocks at the shore
below the cottage. Then there were no roads at all. There were no towns and no people. Beyond the dock the big lake opened northward
into
John and Kathy needed the beauty and solitude of the lake, but the lake is as dangerous as it is beautiful. It is a place where they can also become so lost that no one can find them.
Part of the novel takes place in Viet Nam, which to John and his fellow soldiers was a maze of jungle, rice fields, and villages fraught with hidden dangers: Viet Cong, mines, booby traps, and villagers who could appear friendly during the day but support the Viet Cong at night. It is a place where magic, luck, and superstition replace rational thought, a place where John Wade becomes the Sorcerer. When John shoots PFC Weatherby, he is standing waist deep in slime at the bottom of an irrigation ditch. In this setting, the line between right and wrong is obscured. John becomes disoriented and loses his way.
The lake and
There are numerous parallels and contrasts between the
various settings. For example, the
nightmare world John inhabits as a result of post traumatic stress syndrome
turns the cottage into a “
The point of view in the novel is complex. At times the narrator tells the story from the third-person omniscient point of view, at times he simply presents a list of evidence, and at times he presents his own speculation about what might have happened. Trying to analyze what this approach might mean, especially in terms of the theme is difficult, but O’Brien explains who the narrator is in a footnote at the end of Chapter 6:
“Yes, and I am a theory man too. Biographer, historian, medium – call me what you want – but even after four years of hard labor I’m left with little more than supposition and possibility. John Wade was a magician; he did not give away many tricks. Moreover, there are certain mysteries that weave through life itself, human motive and human desire. Even much of what might appear to be fact in this narrative – action, word, thought – must ultimately be viewed as a diligent but still imaginative reconstruction of events. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident. In any case, Kathy Wade is forever missing, and if you require solutions, you will have to look beyond these pages. Or read a different book. (30)
O’Brien also tells us at the beginning of the book that
there are references to real people, places, and events, but Kathy and John
Wade are fictional as are all the characters in
The fact that the narrator gives us different kinds of
information both from his own perspective and from other perspectives forces us
to view the story in very different ways.
A less complex narrator may have made John Wade into a sympathetic
character or a villain. Lt. Calley, the leader of “Charlie” Company and the only person
ever jailed for the
So, why does the narrator tell the story? Why does he tell it by piecing together fragments of narrative, evidence, and speculation, sometimes with no apparent connection? What is it that he focuses our attention on? Does he make a single point, or are there a number of related themes?
O’Brien uses a number of recurring images (literary figures
of speech) in the novel. A good example
is the pair of snakes John sees along the trail near Pinkville
[
“You know, maybe I’m way off,” she’d say, “but I get this creepy feeling like you’re always there. Always worming
around inside me.” John would smile his candidate’s smile. “Very true. Not worming, though, snaking.” (72)
In Chapter 10, we learn that the nature of their relationship is both positive and negative. They love and support each other, but there is much unspoken between them. Despite the warning signs – John’s screams in the middle of the night indicate that he is suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome – neither is able to face the underlying problems in their relationship. “It was in the nature of their love that Kathy did not insist that he see a psychiatrist, and that John did not feel the need to seek help” (75). They do eventually devour each other like the snakes. It is interesting to note that all of possible outcomes of the story posed by the narrator are tragic.
There are many other recurring images in the novel, but the most predominant are those which deal with magic. There are the mirrors in John’s head, his nickname, Sorcerer, tricks of various kinds, transformations, secrets, trap doors, charms, and ghosts. Magic for John is a way to gain control of and manipulate reality, but it is also a way to make things disappear, to hide them, and to pretend they don’t exist. He can gain control over his father with the “Guillotine of Death,” and he can also make PFC Weatherby and Thuan Yen disappear. John is like the stage magician in The Glass Menagerie who gives us illusion in the form of truth. He represses the traumatic experiences of his life in order to make them disappear, but his father, Thuan Yen and PFC Weatherby are still there and continue to reappear. John wakes from nightmares and screams, “Kill Jesus!” He “glides” through periods of time he does not remember. He boils water and pours it over the house plants. He may have murdered Kathy by pouring boiling water over her. In the end, John performs the ultimate disappearing act:
“Kath,” he’d say, peering down at her, “Kath, my Kath,” the palm of his hand poised above her lips as if to control the miracle of her breathing. In the dark, sometimes, he would see a vanishing village. He would see PFC Weatherby, and his father’s white casket, and a little boy trying to manipulate the world. Other times he would see himself performing the ultimate vanishing act. A grand finale, a curtain closer. He did not know the technique yet, or the hidden mechanism, but in his mind’s eye he could see a man and a woman swallowing each other up like that pair of snakes along the trail near Pinkville, first the tails, then the heads, then both of them finally disappearing inside each other forever. Not a footprint, not a single clue. Purely gone – the trick of his life. The burdens of secrecy would be lifted. Memory would be null. They would live in perfect knowledge, all things visible, all things invisible, no wires or strings, just that large dark world where one plus one will always come to zero.” (76)
In this passage O’Brien brings the recurring images together with a number of the supporting themes. A careful examination of these images points us toward the main theme. Why does “one plus one always come to zero” in John and Kathy’s world?” The interview below may provide some clues.
In the
As it was twenty-five years ago, the subject of
Question: In The
Things They Carried, you describe something your narrator, if not you, did
to the man who didn't take care of a wound. It seems to be a smaller version of
crossing a line that you or the narrator should not have crossed. You say,
"I was
O'Brien
That's the truth. That's all of us, civilians and soldiers;
the gender doesn't matter. In all of us, I think there are seeds of evil, seeds
of sin, the potential for it. Everything I've ever written about in my life,
whether it's about
When you're telling stories about a war or particularly
about
Question: Did the peculiar nature of the Vietnam War cause
the line at
O’Brien
In part, yes.
Question: Some people have said that the villagers were
mysterious, didn't seem to pick a side, and somehow could avoid the mines, and
that on occasion little kids or women would be booby-trapped and used as
weapons. Does that in any way explain what happened in
O’Brien
The villagers probably were made psychologically into the
enemy, but I never saw any kids carrying hand grenades and stuff like that. It
was a big myth that was taught to us in boot camp. It was a bunch of
bullshit—women with razor blades in their vaginas and all kinds of absolute
bullshit. There were no mitigating circumstances. It was mass murder. If Paul Meadlo or Charles Hutto or Max Hutson or any of those guys were to go up and blow someone
away right now—fire a round into his stomach—you would put him in jail. If he
did it to twenty-five more people, and if he shot someone's head off and shot
him in the balls and decapitated him, you would probably have him in jail. If
you're in
I experienced the same frustrations, but I didn't cross that line. There is an axiological line, a line between rage and frustration on the one hand and murder on the other. Although I experienced exactly what those people experienced in the same place, we didn't cross the line. The question then becomes why. Why did those people cross the line? Why didn't we cross the line? That's the abiding mystery. That's what is so frustrating and why everyone is so confused. The mystery is why did these guys do it and not the others. That's the mystery of evil that Joseph Conrad writes about in Heart of Darkness. No one knows what makes the blood sizzle to the point of pulling that trigger and watching those guts explode. It's a mystery that's going to remain a mystery.
Ron Ridenhour's* and Hugh Thompson's** heroism is a mystery, too. One wonders if, on another day, Thompson might not have landed. Or if, on another day, the guys in Charlie Company wouldn't have begun pulling those triggers. Maybe it was something in the temperature. Maybe it was that first burst of gunfire, and someone else shot. If that second person hadn't been nearby, the second person wouldn't have shot. All those variables are so mysterious and so beyond us now as to be utterly inexplicable.
I just finished reading a book by Gary Gilmore’s brother Michael Gilmore. He grew up in the same family as Gary Gilmore.*** Michael Gilmore turned out to be a writer for Rolling Stone, although both brothers grew up in the same family and experienced pretty much the same stuff.
What would have happened to Ron Ridenhour if he had been sent to Charlie Company and had been there that day? Those are the things that are utterly inexplicable. There is a certain frustration and a tension because you cannot explain the inexplicable. It makes me go out and want to smoke cigarettes because I've resigned myself to the knowledge that evil is one of these things that is almost like crankcase oil. It seeps into your veins, it's there for awhile, and then it seeps away. If you try to define it, you're trying to do what the disciples did who wrote the Gospels in the Bible. There are certain things in the world that are mysterious. What happened at My Lai that day in the souls oh those people is a mystery, just as it was a mystery at Lidice [Czechoslovakia, 1942], at Little Big Horn, and in Bosnia.
Calley**** was only one of many people who committed murder that day, but he wasn't a scapegoat. He should be in jail for the rest of his life. How can he be a scapegoat if he confessed to shooting women and kids and babies and old men? How can he be a scapegoat, since he did it? Scapegoats don't do anything. He is literally not a scapegoat. Language has to mean something. It's like calling you a murderer. You say you didn't murder anybody, and I say I didn't mean you actually murdered anybody. Words have to mean something. Scapegoat means someone who didn't do anything but who is being falsely accused of doing it. I disagree with those who try to somehow build up a wall between Calley, Calley's acts, and Calley's murders on the one hand, and those people above and beneath him on the other. He was guilty of murder; he ought to be in jail, but so should a lot of other people.
Some people say Calley was an incompetent officer, but incompetence is no excuse, nor is IQ. Nothing is an excuse for murder. That was murder. It seems to me commonsensical. A man pulled the trigger on a gun. He admitted doing it and that he killed babies and shot them in the head. He is guilty of murder. That's not to say that other people shouldn't be prosecuted, too. They should have been. Hutson, Hutto, Meadlo, Gary Roschevitz, Floyd Wright, Varnado Simpson*****—those people should be in jail. They should be in jail. Why aren't they?
The question about people up the line has bugged me. There
are two issues. One issue has to do with the cover-up. That's one kind of
crime. Another crime is murder. Both are crimes, but there is a tendency for
some strange reason to want to turn attention to Koster
and to
Question: Was it your experience that the war was compartmentalized and run by lieutenants?
O'Brien
I'm talking about the guys on the ground who were pulling triggers. PFCs, sergeants, and spec, fours were killing people. Calley wasn't always around these guys. They were doing it on their own in different places. He wasn't directing a murder. There were also murders happening off in the adjacent hamlet. These were people like me, PFCs and spec, fours committing murder. Galley, the lieutenant, was a murderer, but so were the other people. They should be in jail. I don't see how one can feel anything else but that.
Question: If Hugh Thompson could see what was going on there, those guys in higher authority could see it from their helicopters, too.
O'Brien
I'm not saying they aren't culpable. They are culpable of
not stopping it. They are culpable of covering up. They are culpable of various
felonies. They should be tracked down and prosecuted like any war criminal, but
that doesn't mitigate or take away from the crimes being committed on the
ground by the people pulling the triggers. They are all guilty, but the people
on the ground are guilty of shooting babies in the face.
Question: You say it's a mystery, but isn't part of the answer politics?
O'Brien
I don't give a shit what the justification is. I'm sure that part of it is politics, but who cares? They committed murder. If I were a prosecutor, I'd try to find some way to bring these people to account for murder. Adolph Eichmann was tracked down years and years later and sentenced to death.
Question: Is there any way for
O'Brien
I don't think that the wounds should be healed. We live in
this weird culture where we think everything can be helped and healed, even if
somebody goes out and shoots someone, I think that
we've healed the wounds too well, if anything. The country has obliterated the
horror that was
Question: Was the body count a contributing factor in all of
this, as a problem of the war and at
O’Brien
Bodies are counted when they are shot, and so you call in
three dead VC. That does nothing to explain what happened at
Question: But the argument goes that a villager body equals a VC body.
O'Brien
I know that's how the argument goes. I'm saying the argument is untrue. They shot innocent people. It's a mystery. That's why you're asking me the questions. Read Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, and read the testimony of some of the guys who actually did it. I'm thinking of Fred Widmer. He's like me, and he was there. "I don't know what happened. I can't explain it. I look back twenty-some years. How could I have done this? That wasn't me." These are his words, more or less. It's a mystery to him. In the same way it's a mystery to a lot of people when they leave a cocktail party after having somehow said something very stupid and embarrassing. They jerk awake in the middle of the night, saying, "How could I have done such a stupid, silly thing?" Our behaviors are not always planned, and they are not always explicable, even to us. Evil is a mysterious thing. It's a mystery even to this day. If I could get into Calley's skin or the skin of Paul Meadlo or the skin of Varnado Simpson, I think I would be saying: "How could I have done it? What happened to me that day?" I think the answer would be, "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know."
*Ron Ridenhour’s letter of
**Hugh Thompson
was a helicopter pilot who witnessed the
***A convicted
murderer who was killed by a
****Leader of
Charlie Company. Lt. William Calley was convicted for
his role in the My Lai Massacre and spent 4 months in Federal Prison.
*****Members of
Charlie Company who participated in the My Lai Massacre
Background History of the Viet Nam War
My Lai Courts-Martial Information
Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome
Works Cited
Facing
Meyer, Michael. The
O’Brien, Tim. In the