The Brothers Karamazov is an enthralling thriller about the strive for self-redemption in the eyes of God as well as in the hearts of the Russians. The murder of Fyodor Karamazov, a foolish and heartless savage who betrays his own sons of a father’s care, venomously seeps its way into Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha’s lives causing innocence to request fault and suffering. With intricate characterizations, Dostoevsky magnificently presents the internal agony that derives from a wavering spirit.
The religious teachings of the great elder Father Zosima engross the minds of the spiritually inadequate throughout the novel. Dostoevsky essentially carries these guidelines to peaceful immortality by means of the character Alyosha. At the death bed of the holy man, Alyosha absorbs the sanctified secrets and thus transmits them,through Dostoevsky’s technique of linkage, into the minds of about all of the characters in the novel, creating a strong, common vine that integrates itself from the beginning paragraph to the epilogue.
The main theory that …
Desertion in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
Desertion in Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
The “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is a story of many things when looked at from the right perspective. The validity of the story actually has nothing to do with its main purpose, which is to explain how Vietnam changed the American soldiers who were a part of the conflict. O’Brien’s purpose is to inform his readers of the effect that Vietnam had on American GI’s. Told by Rat Kiley, the “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” can be seen as a touching love story; sweethearts united even during a war. However, the true focus of the story is not love but change and desertion.
Kiley is telling the story to illustrate how all GI’s changed in their Vietnam experience. The fact that the main character is a woman drives his point even farther home. She is the very portrait of mainstream, wholesome America; the only thing she lacks is an apple pie. Kiley describes her as “This cute blonde – just a kid, just barely out of high school – she shows up with a suitcase and one of those plastic cosmetic bags.” (O’Brien 90) This girl is the antithesis of what one would expect to find in Vietnam. She is pure and innocent. Throughout her time in Vietnam she changes from this image to something very different, she spends less time with her boyfriend, Mark Fossie. Mary Anne hangs around with the Green Berets, who are very different from the other soldiers. Eventually she becomes one of them, marking a total transformation, “There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues. 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.” (O’Brien 110) Vietnam changed Mary Anne; it forced her to become something as foreign to America as the war itself.
The “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” is also a story of desertion: desertion of people and customs. Mary Anne deserts her boyfriend and her culture. As she becomes more involved into Vietnam she drifts away from her boyfriend, Fossie. She disappears one night and Fossie is distraught, “‘Gone,’ Fossie said, ‘Rat, listen, she’s sleeping with somebody.