The life and death of a main character and his/her search for identity have proven to be an intriguing and forceful drive in many areas of fine arts. For centuries and even milleniums, writers have based their writings on the human pursuit of self-identity. One of such author is Tim O’Brien and his work called “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” The novel “The things they carried” by Tim O?Brien takes place during the war in Vietnam and deals especially with the effects which this war has on young American soldiers. The novel contains many stories, which may sound strange to people, who have never experienced war, but one of the strangest ones is definitely the one about “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”. “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is a story where love and war collide after a soldier brings his sweetheart to his Vietnamese post. It is a story is about the metamorphosis of a girl, who traveled to Vietnam to visit her boyfriend (on his wish), from a perfectly normal high-school kid to an undefinable creature of the dark. There is a lot of metamorphosis that takes place gradually and in small steps.
I think that this story thorough vivid descriptions of the main female characters feelings Mary Ann, shows her search for identity. At the beginning, just after her arrival in Vietnam, nothing seems unusual about her but the fact that she is visiting her boyfriend, a doctor at an aid station, during the war. Mary Ann is described during this phase as an attractive, young, blond girl. She is represented to the reader as innocent and pure, simply by the expressions used to describe her. Spending some time there Mary Anne became interested in Vietnamese way of life and wanted to learn more about it. Reading more I realized that having spent a short time in that place Mary Ann was becoming a different person.
The Essay on The Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong By Tim Obrien
The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong By Tim O'Brien The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is about the metamorphosis of a girl, who traveled to Vietnam to visit her boyfriend (on his wish), from a perfectly normal high-school kid to an indefinable creature of the dark. The metamorphosis takes place gradually and in small steps. At the beginning, just after her arrival in Vietnam, nothing seems ...
She had a strong desire to be like one of the guys. This story depicts Mary Annes change in personal hygiene. No cosmetics, no fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped it in a dark green bandanna, (OBrien 98).
Mary Anne was starting to become a whole new person. She was no longer a clean innocent girl but a brutal solder always ready to kill.
Elongated and narrow, like pieces of blackened leather, the tongues were threaded along a length of copper wire, one overlapping the next, the tips curled upward as if caught in a final shrill syllable (OBrien 111).
Like Mary Ann Miss Noi from Fairy Tale written by Robert Olen Butler also had her search for self-identity. Fairy Tale is one from “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” the collection of 15 stories, that is told by a Vietnamese girl named Miss Noi who was transplanted from the Mekong Delta region of their homeland to the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. Before she was a dumb Saigon bargirl. One man that she met in Saigon and felt in love with took her to America in 1974. But it appeared in America that he appeared to be a different person. After leaving this guy Miss Moi travels through America, works in different bars and is trying to find who really she is and what is her place in this country.
Concluding my essay I wan t to say that the true revealing of ones identity comes only when one can overcome that blindness of the inner-self and look beyond the conditioned patterns of the mind. And indeed this is not an easy task but once an identity is found a person really finds his/her place and destiny in this world. These two stories showed me greatly that our search for identities is a crucial thing in our lives as it can change them completely..
