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Of Ancient Greeks and Modern Men - Written in a Day

Ursula K. Le Guin, award-wining author, wrote, in her book, The Dispossessed, “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share.” Such a statement rings very true today, especially in our modern digital age, where information is sent and shared around the world. In this modern age, Plato and Aristotle’s views have fallen short, but Sartre’s view on ownership have hit the mark, with ownership becoming less about owning a physical object and more about the lasting effects is has long after it ceases to exist.

In our digital age, our “things” has shifted from the tangible – real objects – to the intangible – information stored by ones and zeroes. With the advent of this new age, ownership has also shifted. No longer does buying something mean you own it; even after buying it, that software is still property owned by those who created it; you only own the skills or memories that come out of that software. That Spanish learning program you bought really isn’t yours, but the lessons and skills you have learned through it still are. Similarly, pirates – people who illegally obtain and share software – are still able to reap its benefits in the same way as those who purchased that software, making ownership a more confusing idea than before – ownership, without ownership, is now possible.

However, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle still contain a nugget of truth – their relationship between ownership and morals. Whether is be owning a house or owning some skills, the relationship of ownership and morals still exists, albeit in a more complex form. Plato’s belief that “owning objects is detrimental to a person’s character”, and Aristotle belief that “ownership of tangible goods helps to develop moral character” are both applicable in the twenty-first century. In some ways, it is obvious: software meant to hack – such as RATS, password crackers, or penetration-based Linux distros – are used immorally, and are detrimental to morals, while other software, like FreeRice – an application that donates 10 grains of rice to those in need everytime you answer a question correctly – clearly builds morals. However, some software can both build and destroy morals – without even having to use it. The process of obtaining software – either buying the software from those who worked hard to develop it, or downloading it off websites such as ThePirateBay – can build or destroy morals. Buying the software, and helping those developers who worked hundreds of hours to create it, builds character, while pirating it – and leaving those developers unrewarded* – destroys character, and leads to this behavior again. Ownership, even in this digital age, still impacts morals, although its relationship with ownership existing in a duality that Plato and Aristotle had never forseen.

Ownership – with the possibility to share and copy it – has become more confusing and complicated than it was at the time of Plato and Aristotle. In their argument about how ownership changes someone, Aristotle and Plato – due to the time they lived in – did not consider how ownership is not only fluid, but also a label that can apply to things both tangible and not, although their core ideas on ownership’s impact on morals are still ring true. However, Sartre was able to foresee the fluidity of ownership, and develop his ideas around that concept. Ownership is no longer defined by the objects or software that are owned, but rather by the abstract things, like memories and skills. it leaves behind. In our modern age, these memories and skills define our character, not the the objects from which they are derived.

Classic Literature Research Essay - Written over a month

A renowned work of art is exquisitely crafted: each brushstroke meticulously applied onto the canvas in an eloquent translation from mind to material. Classic pieces of literature, too, share this level of detailed craft. However being admitted into the ranks of the literary canon are more stringent than just having the quality of being well-written. Classic literature also has to contain a universal and timeless theme, be relatable and open to many interpretations, and innovate on the genre in novel ways. Furthermore, many classic books are old, and thus fit the cliche of being “tested and true”, but this is not necessary for a novel to be a classic. The Things They Carried , by Tim O’Brien, is a relatively recent novel, but deserves to be called a classic in its own right. It is an exquisitely crafted book, contains a universal theme about war, and does so while creating a commentary about the genre in which it is written—the war story. Thus, The Things They Carried is a novel well deserving of a spot in the literary canon.

O’Brien has crafted his novel with extreme care. In The Things They Carried , each word holds powerful meaning and so does each comma and quotation mark. The Things They Carried , as one would guess, is about the things that the soldiers in the Vietnam War carried, the clothing, the guns, the bullets, etc. and their weights. But these physical weights are all described in the first chapter of the book. The rest of the book, then describes the emotional weight of the war on the soldiers. While O’Brien does do this through plot, such as having a soldier shoot a dog out of boredom, he also illustrates this emotional weight through his diction and syntax. Through sentences as simple as “They made themselves laugh” show how actions that are spontaneous and relaxing—through the use of “made”—become anything but (O’Brien 14). Furthermore, O’Brien sometimes chooses to utilize or omit punctuation when writing the spoken words of a character. He does so to “enhance the unconventionality of his writing” while creating a wholly unique style of penmanship, innovating writing itself, not just his genre (Evans 208). But The Things They Carried does not only contain elements of prose, but also contains poetic elements, such as consonance and meter. In doing so, he creates an anaphora , where these words receive the most stress, and therefore the most attention (Evans 212). This use of anaphora is evident when O’Brien discusses the soldiers’ cowardice: “They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained” where both the “kuh” sound and the “rrr” sound are repeated and stressed due to the rhythm created (O’Brien 14). In the sentence preceding, O’Brien uses meter when listing out emotions: Grief, terror, love, longing. Here, the first two adjectives are negative, and the next two are positive; they invoke opposite emotion (O’Brien 14). The meter follows this as well: “two accented syllables followed by an unaccented syllable (“grief, terror”), which are balanced by two more accented syllables followed by another unaccented syllable (“love, longing”)” (Evans 211). His explicit meaning is matched and intensified by his use of meter. It is no surprise, then, that “O’Brien’s prose is often praised as effectively ‘rhythmic’“ (Evans 212). These are one of many ways that O’Brien employs to create such a detailed and impactful world that amplify the novel’s meaning. In fact, every example of O’Brien’s craft in this paragraph was from one page of his book. With such density of craft, The Things They Carried is undoubtedly a literary masterpiece, and deftly fulfils this requirement of a classic.

Being a classic is more than just good writing: a classic must contain a timeless theme. The theme of The Things They Carried is deeply rooted within the truth of war and war stories. In the novel, O’Brien outright states “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” for a heroic war story “very old and terrible lie” (O’Brien 43). War, according to O’Brien, is the very essence of evil and obscenity, and ‘true’ war stories only attempt to cover that up. Human nature will never change, and thus the ideas of this—the ideas about war itself—will always remain relevant. It’s the same reason anti-war songs from the cold war still ring true today—war has stayed the same, and has been from the beginning of human history. Yet this is something that many classics already discuss. But The Things They Carried goes further. O’Brien analyzes the genre of the war story as “he examines the process of writing one….the medium becomes the message” (Calloway). Such a process is wholly unique, as it arguably erects a theme that contends with the nature of fiction itself. Indeed, by saying “In many cases a true [non-fiction]war story cannot be believed”, and using fiction as the vessel of his story, he champions Fiction as the only true way of telling an honest account of war. Thus, the theme is universal, while also innovating on the genre, especially by criticising other war stories for their flaws. Thus, The Things They Carried proves to be more than just another book about the oversaturated topic of war, by taking a new, fresh perspective. The novel is many things at once: “part novel, part collection of stories, part essays, part journalism; it is, more significantly, all at the same time” (Calloway).Thus, the themes in the book—about suffering and the essence of war stories— will live on well after war itself is eradicated. While war never changes, the typical war story—through O’Brien’s influence—surely will.

However, a novel can have an incredibly sophisticated and timeless theme, but be relevant and relatable to anyone, not just an English major or a war veteran. Outside literary circled, the book even has uses in fields such as psychology. Frank Hassebrock, a psychology professor, discussed in a college journal how he uses The Things They Carried in his classroom. Hassebrock wrote that “psychological research presented by Schacter readily shows that our memories are easily influenced by many factors and that memory errors occur frequently” and tied it O’Brien’s description in The Things They Carried how “it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. When a guy dies,…you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot” (O’Brien 44). The Things They Carried is not limited to collegiate studies, and O’Brien states exactly that. In an interview on the PBS Newshour with Jeffrey Brown, O’Brien states, “I certainly wasn’t aiming at a high school or a collegiate audience.” The Things They Carried is different than many war stories and fiction overall. It leaves us guessing upon the validity of the stories within: whether O’Brien really did kill a man—he first states he killed a man, then later states he watched someone else do it—or whether one of his friends truly did kill himself after coming to the states, etc. This confusion and ambiguity is intentional. It blurs the line between being separate from the events and experiencing them first hand. O’Brien, by his own admission, stated “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (O’Brien 101). Thus, this book is more than a book: it is a simulation of a soldier in war. O’Brien makes the reader feel what is happening rather than just read it, claiming that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth”, and that, in a war story, what one feels is more important than what actually happened (O’Brien 115). Furthermore, by categorizing it a fiction, The Things They Carried allows readers a vicarious experience of war, one in which we can experience the raw emotions of the war by avoiding the emotional shield and numbness that a ‘true’ war story—categorized non-fiction—creates. Doing so in The Things They Carried makes the pain only hit harder. Lastly, this is all tied up nicely with “ O’Brien’s fidelity to detail…that helps create the ‘reality’ of Vietnam for readers.” (Chattarji). Indeed, O’Brien intended “ go beyond war and to really write a book about…your life or the life of a mortician or a housewife or a stockbroker” (Brown). Thus, The Things They Carried is able to pull the reader in and offer many different interpretations, and by immersing the reader within the story, makes the central theme only more powerful and heavy. For a book that does not elicit emotion or reaction can not be classified as a classic, but The Things They Carried succeeds on both accounts.

The Things They Carried is an eloquent book that is well crafted, contains a universal meaning while retaining a social commentary about war and war stories that will continue ringing true for centuries and influence future novels. Furthermore, It pushes the boundaries of a “true” war story and provides many different lenses for their interpretation of that meaning. For these reasons, The Things They Carried should be called a classic. The Things They Carried is not just a another war story about the valour of war, as many “true” war stories are. Rather, The Things They Carried provides an invaluable insight into the truth of war: the dullness, the cowardice, and the evils, while also providing a relatability outside war itself.