Abstraction in Writing

Abstraction, both in the art and literary worlds, is characterized by shedding traditional rules in an attempt to make the reader or viewer experience emotions. In art, the rules that are shed are the concepts of realistic form and recognizable figures. In literature, the rules are linear plots and a single narrator. In art the concepts are replaced with broad, bright colors or interesting shapes and patterns. In literature it is stream of conscience narration and a non-linear plot. Mrs. Dalloway is an excellent example of abstract writing in literature. It challenging traditional methods of writing in a way that emphasizes emotion and personal experience above reason and facts. The unique and sometimes confusing style Woolf uses in her book is the interesting culmination of the ideas that created abstract art.

Character Development in Mrs. Dalloway

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf has a unique way of developing characters. She presents the reader with the opinions and memories of her characters which reveal details of their lives. Normally, an author would present the circumstances of a character's life to explain their thoughts and emotions, but Woolf reverses this process. The reason she is able to do this is the stream of conscious narration, and the narration constantly switching between each character's minds. This gives acces to their thought process, but, unfortunately, no clarification for why they are thinking certain things, requiring the reader the reflect more deeply on the characters to understand the. While this style can be confusing and unclear, it provides a unique and powerful way to understand characters.

Is The Things They Carried a Coping Mechanism?

In The Things They Carried, O'Brien talks about the way the soldiers dealt with death in Vietnam. They developed numerous euphemisms in order to avoid the word, and skirted around the subject as much as possible. Once a man had died, they would tell stories and jokes about him, as if he were still around, in order to "keep him alive." Based on this explanation, it is possible that O'Brien has not gotten over the way they coped with death in the war. He, in writing this book, is continuing to tell stories about the men who died, still keeping them alive. While the characters he uses are fictional, they are likely based on characteristics and actions of the men he served with, and therefore representative of them. O'Brien is able to recognize that he was unable to accept the soldiers' death in his book, but he may still be unable to achieve complete acceptance.

The Importance of the Truth in The Things They Carried

In Tim O'Brien's novel, the truth is constantly being called into question. Before the book even begins, there is a line telling the reader that the book is entirely a work of fiction. It would be reasonable to assume that this dispels any further mystery, but, somehow, it adds to it. For the majority of the stories, the narrator is speaking in first person, and at the very least shares Tim O'Brien's name. This pushes the reader towards believing the story is autobiographical. It is undeniable that the story is at least influenced by O'Brien's time in Vietnam and growing up during the era, it is just difficult to decipher which details reflect the truth. This is not the product of unclear or poor writing, I believe that this deception was intended to be a part of reading The Things They Carried. It allows O'Brien to demonstrate that, in some ways, the truth is irrelevant. The stories all aim to convey simple concepts and demonstrate simple emotions, that both the reader should feel and the soldiers had felt. In the chapter How to Tell a War Story, O'Brien explains this stylistic choice by saying the truest war stories don't necessarily describe what happened, but instead encourage the same emotions that the soldiers felt, and the "truths" that they chose to except in place of reality.