Linked Essay: Realism Vs. Imagery
In The Woman Warrior, author Maxine Hong Kingston, describes the struggles of a Chinese-American woman growing up as she attempts to find a balance between two cultures and to find her own identity within them. Kingston's novel abounds with imagery, from the ghosts and barbarians, to the different colors of black, white, and red. What is real is that through her stories, she makes it evident that she experiences many conflicts between what she is being taught at home and what she is experiencing in American society. As appose to The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien, where many descriptions and realism were used to capture the audience and draw them into the actual events in the story, allowing them to feel the burden of emotional and physical weight on the characters, who were fighting to preserve their sanity and lives. The vivid detail and realistic narration were only tools used by the author to prepare a story to be more believable but it can also mean what the men were carrying internally such as grief, pain, misery, and love. “…the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and consci
Realistic points were made when Kingston was growing up, she lived by the standards of what her mother wanted her to become, a women warrior. She looked up to those who might lead her to accomplish what she longs for. Kingston clearly establishes her beliefs and values of Chinese culture in each “talk-story” and then points out the contrasts with American culture. Her mother wants to instill traditional Chinese values in her daughter, with the desire that her daughter become a strong, unique individual, a “woman warrior.” As to in The Things They Carried, the knowledge of death and its closeness causes the men in the story to alter their behavior by changing they way they display power, modifying emotions to relieve guilt, and by exhibiting different actions to ease anxiety. When someone dies in a war, someone else will get the blame for his death but no one knows the real truth. It just seems as though they needed someone to blame it on. O’Brien wants to send out a message that a man isn’t always the blame for another man’s death, but it also can be a variety of reasons such as nature, God, climate, the field etc…O’Brien listed a lot of reasons to be blamed for, not necessarily another man. “When a man died, there had to be blame…You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war...You could blame God…” (O’Brien 189-199) This is true because in the time of war, no one is to blame for anyone’s death because the men do not intend to shoot that person as in aiming at them, but as a whole, they just shoot out of random. If someone is hit, they’re dead. But no one is to be sorry for what they did because it’s war; the toughest time for all the men. In The Things They Carried, the story was brought to life by the realistic but disjointed narration of the author, illustrated by returning to the death of Ted Lavender throughout the story. Someone who had actually experienced similar events could only write the story wit
Some topics in this essay:
Tim O’Brien,
Women” Kingston,
Mu Lan,
Women Warrior,
Warrior Kingston,
Ted Lavender,
Realistic Kingston,
Hong Kingston,
God…” O’Brien,
women warrior,
Tigers” Kingston,
tim o’brien,
chinese culture,
tim o’brien adding,
story sound,
true war,
traditional chinese,
standards mother,
realistic narration,
sound believable,
fa mu lan,
story sound believable,
wife slave,
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Approximate Word count = 1335
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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