classic example of how ones’ environment can change them
Mary Anne Bell is an outsider in the represents setting having come into Vietnam out of love with no intention of getting into the war. It is clear that she is out of place and doesn’t belong where she is. Uncomfortable with war strategies such as night raids she was the ideal all American girl innocent caring young and beautiful. She came with her pink dresses culottes and make up unaware of what she was getting herself into she is a classic example of how ones’ environment can change them
Mary Anne is also a clear embodiment of transformation from innocence to experience. Illustrated by how she is transformed from the sweet innocent girl to an animal-like hunter who wears a necklace of tongues. It is clear that once innocence is lost it can never be recovered. Mary Anne is the perfect example of love in the novel. Having being brought in by her sweetheart Mark Fossie unlike Lt. Cross and Henry Dobbins carry keepsakes that remind them of love and her transformation from an innocent lover to a fearless warrior is the best example of the link between war and love and how easily one can shift from one to another.
When she comes to Vietnam she carries clothes and makeup to please the man she loves a clear show of insanity brought by love but when the burden of war takes up her mind then the necklace of the tongue becomes a clear depiction of the depth of her insanity and how her innocent soul is sucked into the depth of darkness by the war
References
Calloway, C. (1995). “How to Tell a True War Story”: Metafiction in The Things They Carried. Critique: studies in contemporary fiction, 36(4), 249-257.
Calloway, C. (1995). “How to Tell a True War Story”: Metafiction in The Things They Carried. Critique: studies in contemporary fiction, 36(4), 249-257..
Chen, T. (1998). Unraveling the Deeper Meaning”: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O’Brien’s” The Things They Carried. Contemporary Literature, 39(1), 77-98.