Within the war short story genre, pervading lonliness persistently appears thematically. In effect, the loneliness of war amplifies other emotions, even when positive, to an extreme and thus negative point. For example, Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” conveys how young soldiers cope with being drafted into the Vietnam War, thus torn from their youth. Jimmy Cross is only 22 years old and as the leader of the plattoon he finds himself constantly conflicted with desires to be with his crush, Martha.
The most important things Jimmy carries are pictures and letters sent to him by Martha. The members of the plattoon, in semi-sexualized fashion, jokingly refer to carrying objects as “humping” them. So, “...Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps...it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive.” (O’Brien 253) With the replacement verb, the impossibility of their hopes and desires is portrayed as something that weighs them down.
With Martha always on his mind, Jimmy finds himself falling in elaborate daydreams about dates with Martha. Even though they’re no more than fantasies, he also begins to worry whether Martha is moving on without him there. He remembers their movie date when he touched her knee and she looked at him sadly and thinks “[I] should’ve carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. [I] should’ve risked it.” thus “Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought of new things he should’ve done.”(O’Brien 253) The responsibility and burden of war amplifies his romantic regrets and turns them into obsessive thoughts.
However, when Ted Lavender dies, Jimmy takes the blame as Lieutenant and resolves to burn Martha’s photos and letters. Contemplating Martha’s letters yet again, he notes “She signed the letters ‘Love,’ but it wasn’t love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter.” (O’Brien 264) He has to get rid of all physical traces of Martha he has in order to forget her merely consoling notion of “separate but together”, showing just how far he must distance himself to get over his unhealthy fixation.
In what ways do you think the wartime setting/theme amplify Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’ romantic obsession with Martha? Can you identify any similar cause/ effect relationships within the other war genre stories we’ve read?
Although I loved the entirety of your argument, I was particularly captivated by the paragraphs where you said Cross's quest to attain Martha's love was weighting him down BECAUSE OF HIS WARTIME SETTING. I point this out because in my blog I pitted the forces of love and war against each other and never really considered that they were very closely interconnected. But honestly, I like your opinion better because both war and love are pretty inversely related, so thinking about one too much draws away from the other.
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