I find this aspect of the novel disturbing – certainly the presentation of the relationship between Tim (not Timmy) and Linda. Briefly, I’ll quote from the novel:
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it’s tempting to dismiss is as a crush, and infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that when we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.
I just loved her.
She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quiet and fragile-looking.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to meld into her bones – that kind of love.
Well, put together “all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love” with “I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to meld into her bones”, and I know what that kind of love is. The language is plainly sexual. Freud would have no trouble with understanding that the feelings of two nine-year-olds could be sexual. However, what troubles me is not the sexual nature of the love of these two children, it’s that the adult Tim still has sexual feelings for the permanently nine-year old Linda. “Even then” at the start of the last paragraph I quoted implies, “still now”. He still wants to “live inside her body” etc. That is suggested, again, later in the same chapter:
And then it becomes 1990. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way….” (p. 245)
His feelings haven’t changed – how could they, they were already those of sexual love when he was nine. They still are. For some reason, Tim O’Brien’s puts his narrator in a position of lusting after a nine-year old. The author has, I believe, lost control of his narration at this culminating point in the novel.
This next bit I’m less sure of. I’ll continue the quotation above from where I left off:
She’s not the embodied Linda; she’s mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name, like the man who never was. Her real name doesn’t matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and then she died….(p. 245)
The point here is that the “mostly made up”, newly named Linda can only refer to one character in the novel outside of Linda herself. His daughter Kathleen. She, significantly, has just turned ten years old when Tim takes her to Vietnam to the site of Kiowa’s death. He mentions her age, I believe, in order to make the connection with Linda, who died at nine, not making it to ten. Linda lives on in Kathleen. I was disturbed by the narrator’s feelings for the child Linda. I’m further disturbed that he has these feelings, still, and that Kathleen is the embodiment of Linda. What does this say about the father/daughter relationship envisioned?
3 comments:
A new theory popped to my head when re-reading the passage that claims the new embodiment of Linda is “mostly made up". Many other events in the book are untrue, the author admits this. The narrator says that he makes up these things to convey a deeper understanding to the reader, through emotions rather than facts. Perhaps Kathleen is another example of this...literary tool? Tim takes Kathleen to Vietnam when she is 10 to the places where he fought. Kathleen reacts by saying her father needs to let go, not fully understanding the emotional baggage that is still with him, all these years after the war. Maybe Kathleen is an illustration of the narrator’s need to share his experiences that cannot be empathized with by those who weren’t present. If we take that theory for truth, and Kathleen is a continuation of Linda, then perhaps she is an expression of how Tim is received by ALL people after the time of Linda’s death. Tim tells us how deep and complex the relationship between him and Linda is, while he shows us that Kathleen is completely incapable of understanding her father. Perhaps his yearning for Linda is merely a yearning for understanding, and understanding that dies when Linda dies, and is never received upon his return from the war. As for the sexual nature of this yearning, while it may be the author not fully being in control of his writing, it could also be an expression of the way war teaches you to want things. A bit of a stretch, but perhaps when he returns from the war he is a changed man, and is not able to want things in the pure way that he could before he left for war. He wants Linda for the understanding she represents, but doesn’t know how to express this want except through sexuality, a common undertone of war. Kathleen, while very dear to him, is not an entity which he yearns. Thus, I have found a loose theory to cling to which doesn’t involve incest.
If that makes any sense at all.
I do not think that the author is trying to compare the relationship between him and Linda to his daughter's. This is because in the book, he describes the relationship between him and Linda as complex and as if it was real. However, the book shows the author's daughter, Kathleen, as an innocent and naive child. An example would be when Tim (the author) took her to the site of Kiowa's death, Kathleen keeps complaining of how dirty and stinky the place was, and wanted to go home. This really shows that she does not care and does not really understand the point of her father wanting to take her there.
This is why I think the author does not mean to compare Linda with her daughter, because there are too many differences between them that I could not see the connection. In addition, the author probably mentioned that the age of Linda and his daughter is the same probably because his daughter reminded him about Linda. This is not to compare the feelings and relationship he had with Linda and his daughter. In my opinion, it was just a coincidence that Kathleen was about the same age when Linda died, and the author did not have the same feelings for Kathleen as what he had for Linda.
I am not quite sure if Soe's idea or point of view of seeing the author's feeling of Linda and his daughter is a coincidence. Soe’s argument seems like only the Kathleen is an innocent and naïve and Linda is not innocent but I think the author shows purity and innocence of Linda as well. In the page 235, the narrator says
“There were some tufts of hair, little patches of grayish brown fuzz. But what I saw then, and keep seeing now, is all that whiteness. A smooth , pale, translucent white.”
I think the whiteness of Linda’s hair represents her innocence and purity even though they loved like adults as the narrator says. “Melting into bones” was only the narrator’s feeling towards Linda; it doesn’t mean that Linda is not innocent or pure. Therefore, in my opinion, the author shows many evidences that make readers to question that there is a connection of Linda, author’s first love and Kathleen, author’s daughter as Linda was born “with new identity and a new name” as form of Kathleen. And I think it is very terrifying.
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