The Relationships Between Sanity And Insanity English Literature Essay

I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves. As stated by Maxine Hong Kingston in her autobiography, The Woman Warrior, implies that, vocalization in our day to day lives is very important, but perhaps even more as Maxine shows us, is the pressing need to understand the difference between sanity and insanity. Sanity can be defined as the ability to think in a reasonable way and to behave normally. Insanity on the other hand, can be considered to be the opposite. Hong, in her statement, asserts that the difference between the two or rather mental stability and instability is simply made by the ability to communicate though talking. If one cannot properly explain or express one’s self, he or she is likely to be considered insane.

The Things They Carried, is the story about Alpha company in the US army and Cross’ fellow soldiers at war in Vietnam. In his novel, Tim O’Brien narrates his experiences throughout Vietnam. There is a line where he frequently confuses what happens between himself, things that happened between his friends and soldiers, and things that could happen to an individual at large. O’Brien mixes up events, certain people, and different situations, and he brings the reader right along for the wild ride.

In his book, O’Brien shows us the importance of language or rather in this case communication and how the presence or the absence of words can affect an individual’s physical and mental conditions. Tim O’Brien even suggests the significance of words to the soldiers when he describes how the soldiers would converse: “There it is, they’d say. Over and over-there it is, my friend, there it is-as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy and almost crazy.”(O’Brien, 21). O’Brien is trying to show us how spoken words could be so vital and important, so as to be used to manage psychological and even in some cases physical experiences in The Things They Carried. How the act of repeating words was like an act to balance one’s mental state.

But then again, there are times when words are not enough, and the definitions of sanity and insanity in such circumstances tend to change. This is aptly authenticated in the chapters “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes”. Where, Norman Bowker the main protagonist, of these chapters, returns to his hometown at the end of the war. With himself he brings everything that he had experienced, home with him. These things, such as burden, that he carries, place him in an unfamiliar setting, and not what he remembers as hometown. Norman then drives in his father’s car around the seven-mile lake pondering about the past and thinking hypothetically. He drove twelve times around the lake, a total of eighty-four miles, with thoughts constantly running through his head. In my opinion, Norman Bowker constantly circles the lake over and over again because he can’t get to the center of his problems so he constantly finds a way around them.

Bowker nostalgically remembers the times before the war, how he used to drive endlessly with his friends around the same lake while he was in high school. He remembers Sally Kramer, a girl he had once dated, and all the fun memories they had prior to the war. Norman begins to talk to himself as he drives around the lake. He tells stories, the way he would tell Sally, his Dad, and Max. He even continues to include their reactions, while talking to himself. Norman then tells the story tells them the story of the disgustingly smelly “shit field” and how its pungent odor had prevented him from earning a medal, more specifically, the Silver Star. Norman goes on to tell about his attempted rescue of Kiowa, his friend, but then, had to let go, when he felt himself in it as well. He feels guilty throughout the book about not saving Kiowa. He wished he had been more courageous at that point. Max, his best friend, was as real as the conversations he was hypothetically having in his head. Ironically to Norman, the war that had been fought thousands of miles away from home had changed everything that was once close to him. There was nothing valuable about the medals, but there was so much value in the stories that lie behind them, but it was something he could never resort going back to. In the Notes chapter, Bowker wrote O’Brien a letter, the “long, disjointed letter”, in which Bowker described the problem of “finding a meaningful use for his life after the war” (O’Brien, 155). But he couldn’t adequately describe what he felt. O’Brien follows to comment on Bowker’s letter: “The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He did not know what to feel.” (O’Brien, 156). We are led to question ourselves, what is the “truth” behind Bowker’s feelings? Is it possibly a part of O’Brien’s list? It could quite possibly be both.

From the suggestion put forward, certain truths about mental health or rather sanity and insanity emerge from Norman’s episode, to show us how the chances of survival back at home and overall mental health are rely largely on the degree of a person being able to convert their experiences into words and stories by the use of a language that can be communicated. From the way Norman tries to explain himself in his letter to Tim O’Brien, from the type of language he uses, to the way that he tells stories, only imagining how the people in his life prior to the war would react, shows us the lasting affect that the war has left on Bowker’s mind. There was a line between what Norman wanted, and what the war would let him do in the end. He knew no one in the town could remotely relate to his experiences in the war, so he didn’t bother talking to anyone. The thoughts that ran through his head haunted him daily. He spent most of his time alone because he simply could not seem to use language to relate to anyone anymore. Norman might have been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, better known as PTSD. He was trying to snap out of what he was going through, but he was too psychologically tormented by thoughts that he couldn’t actually comprehend himself.

The effects of the war become so real to us just by reading how he Norman felt. The amount burden that Norman had to carry around with him from Vietnam haunted him for the rest of his life. He eventually commits suicide at the YMCA. Conclusively, I believe that Tim O’Brien brought something new to story-telling. In his third chapter , “Spin,” he brought up the idea that war stories are sometimes altered or made up with the intention, for them to be endured or to make a point. In fact, chapter three’s title creates a some sort of irony for it hints that the stories needed to be “spun,” or slightly altered for them to be worthy of re-telling. Up to that point, we read about experiences of certain soldiers during and after the war and the effects of these experiences on their sanity. However, this chapter introduces the possibility that these stories may or may not be true. Therefore, how we to know what information are is real and what information was just made up by O’Brien. So, according to O’Brien, what is truth? Throughout the story, he argues that for a story to be true, the events don’t actually have to take place, and that they can be just as true as ones that do not take place. Finally, it might be unclear to us whether or not he actually experienced the events given how detailed they really were, but in my opinion, because they were so detailed, I believe he was just based on all of the facts and war terms, etc. All of that could end up being another language. It’s something that you have to understand in the war. It’s not something particularly for the reader to comprehend. O’Brien did it to prove a point, more specifically, the effects of words on sanity or in this case, insanity, to emotionally affect the reader even more.