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Dialect
Speaking of Courage
Explanation and Analysis—Deep, Oozy Soup:
In "Speaking of Courage," Bowker drives around the lake in his hometown, thinking back to the night Kiowa died. He uses metaphor and imagery to liken the swampy field to a boiling soup. Throughout the story, the field in his flashback contrasts with the lake next to him. At times, the two seem to flow into each other, as past intermingles with present in Bowker's thoughts and in the narration.
The narrator delivers Bowker's flashback through his imagined dialogue—what he would have told his high school girlfriend Sally if she weren't married, or his dad if he weren't busy watching baseball on TV. He thinks about how he would begin the story about Kiowa's death by describing how "it never stopped raining" and that there was muck "everywhere." Intimately accessing Bowker's thoughts, the narrator explains that "by midnight the field turned into soup":
“Just this deep, oozy soup,” he would’ve said. “Like sewage or something. Thick and mushy. You couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t even lie down, not for long, because you’d start to sink under the soup. Real clammy. You could feel the crud coming up inside your boots and pants.”
The metaphorical language and imagery in this passage give the reader a multisensory impression of the night in Bowker's flashback. By comparing the field to soup, O'Brien illustrates some of its visual aspects, but also the heat, texture, motion, and smell. The oozing field seems to prepare to swallow up the men. As Bowker continues his hypothetical narration of the story, he fixates even more on the field's soupy qualities: "The way the earth bubbled. And the smell."
When the field is bombarded, the metaphorical soup's temperature seems to increase rapidly, as the field goes from oozing to boiling.
The field was boiling. The shells made deep slushy craters, opening up all those years of waste, centuries worth, and the smell came bubbling out of the earth.
The reader receives Bowker's flashbacks to the field by the river alongside the narrator's descriptions of the lake he keeps circling around. As the story progresses, the two become more and more associated. Like the field, the lake is hot and disgusting—"often filthy and algaed." Another parallel comes from the date: it is July 4th, and the town is preparing for its annual firework display. Just as the soldiers took mortar fire when they bivouacked in the field, the lake will witness explosions of its own later that evening.
In the story, Bowker thinks about how he could lecture the people in his town on feces: "The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste." On the gruesome evening in his flashback, the muck of the field filled his nose and mouth. Just before the story ends, he links the field of the flashback with the lake of his current surroundings one final time, by going out into the lake and tasting the water:
After a time he got out, walked down to the beach, and waded into the lake without undressing. The water felt warm against his skin. He put his head under. He opened his lips, very slightly, for the taste, then he stood up and folded his arms and watched the fireworks.
In this touching conclusion, Bowker puts an end to his never-ending circles around the lake, and actually gets into it. The narrator leaves it implicit that, as he opens his mouth, he thinks back to the horrible stink and taste of the field on the night Kiowa died. In addition, the fireworks above him evoke the mortar fire that made the field boil like soup.
Related Themes:
The Ghost Soldiers
Explanation and Analysis—Leaking:
When O'Brien has a flashback to being shot in "The Ghost Soldiers," he uses figurative language to describe the physical sensations in his body. By way of similes and metaphors, he compares his gunshot wound to spilling, leaking, and becoming hollow.
He later experiences these same sensations during his scheme against Bobby Jorgenson, as he feels increasingly fragile and empty. Ultimately, O'Brien's scheme backfires, because he retraumatizes himself as he watches fear seize Jorgenson's body. He had originally set out to teach Jorgenson a lesson but winds up teaching himself one in the process.
As he watches Jorgenson, O'Brien experiences a flashback to the second time he was shot:
It was the same feeling I’d had out along the Song Tra Bong. Like I was losing myself, everything spilling out. I remembered how the bullet had made a soft puffing noise inside me. I remembered lying there for a long while, listening to the river, the gunfire and voices, how I kept calling out for a medic but how nobody came and how I finally reached back and touched the hole. The blood was warm like dishwater. I could feel my pants filling up with it. All this blood, I thought—I’ll be hollow.
In this passage, he uses a simile to compare his current and past feelings to "everything spilling out." He also uses a simile to compare his blood to "warm [...] dishwater." As it fills his pants, he feels as though he will become hollow. In the rest of the flashback, O'Brien continues to metaphorically liken his sensations to leaking:
I was still leaking. [...] I turned and clamped a hand against the wound and tried to plug it up. Leaking to death, I thought. Like a genie swirling out of a bottle—like a cloud of gas—I was drifting upward out of my own body.
Here, O'Brien uses a simile to compare the separation he feels from his body as he goes into shock to "a genie swirling out of a bottle" and "a cloud of gas." The leaking metaphor not only points to the physical sensation of his blood leaving his body, but it also captures the more spiritual or emotional sensation of his soul exiting his corporeal self. The shock both accentuates and shuts down his physical sense of being in a body.
In the end, O'Brien seems to be more negatively impacted by his plot to scare Jorgenson than Jorgenson himself is. While his plan revolved around getting even, the more important outcome seems to be O'Brien's processing of the extreme sensations and emotions he felt after he was shot. He can certainly blame, and even punish, Jorgenson for neglecting to treat him for shock, but the more pressing need is to reflect on what happened when he came face to face with his own mortality.
Related Themes:
The Lives of the Dead
Explanation and Analysis—Linda Kicks the Bucket:
In the collection's final story, "The Lives of the Dead," the narrator shares a flashback from his childhood. When he's nine years old, a girl he loves dies from a brain tumor. However, when he first learns about her death, the news is delivered to him through an idiom. The indirect language makes it simultaneously easier and more difficult to process Linda's death. As a child, O'Brien fixates on this idiom. As an adult, he fixates on the way we use language to abstract difficult emotions.
Before Linda dies, O'Brien's mother attempts to prepare him for what's coming, telling him that people "die sometimes." This is far more direct than the formulation O'Brien receives when Linda actually dies:
“Your girlfriend,” he said, “she kicked the bucket.”
At first I didn’t understand.
“She’s dead,” he said. “My mom told me at lunch-time. No lie, she actually kicked the goddang bucket.”
All I could do was nod. Somehow it didn’t quite register. I turned away, glanced down at my hands for a second, then walked home without telling anyone.
In this section of the flashback, Nick breaks the news to O'Brien by way of an idiom. As a euphemism for death, "kicking the bucket" presumably comes from the act of knocking down what one is standing on when hanging oneself. It is worth noting, however, that the idiom is not necessarily meant to suggest that someone has committed suicide. O'Brien would likely find it difficult to register Linda's death regardless of how the news was delivered, but Nick's idiomatic language seems to contribute to his bewilderment.
As O'Brien processess Linda's death, he continues to fixate on her figurative bucket:
I willed her alive. It was a dream, I suppose, or a daydream, but I made it happen. I saw her coming down the middle of Main Street, all alone. It was nearly dark and the street was deserted, no cars or people, and Linda wore a pink dress and shiny black shoes. I remember sitting down on the curb to watch. All her hair had grown back. The scars and stitches were gone. In the dream, if that’s what it was, she was playing a game of some sort, laughing and running up the empty street, kicking a big aluminum water bucket.
Linda's death is the first time O'Brien encounters death. The bucket becomes a symbol of mortality for the boy, as well as a symbol of the incomprehensibility of death and loss. In his dream, he develops a comprehensive scene in which Linda literally kicks a bucket. When he begins to cry, she brings her bucket over to him and asks why he's sad. “Well, God,” he tells her, “you’re dead.”
After this story, O'Brien reflects on why we use figurative language. As he makes evident throughout the collection, idioms and metaphors are not just something we find in literature, but something we often use in everyday life to make upsetting things feel less upsetting. In many of the stories, the men talk about death euphemistically: "In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead." When Curt Lemon dies, for example, they talk about his body as wastage rather than a real body. One of O'Brien's takeaways from the war is the significance of word choice: "It’s easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn’t human, it doesn’t matter much if it’s dead."
Related Themes:
