First Impressions of Salinger

Well that was quite the story. It felt more like three independent stories than one short story and I enjoyed all 3. To start with the the first part, the story of a young girl talking to her Mom. This had a very different style than Hemingway, it was so heavy on dialog. Personally, I really liked this, it made me care more about the characters, also as a teenager I found this part to be quite relatable. I mean who hasn’t had that conversation with their mother at some point.

The story then moved on to the young man and Sybil. Intriguingly, at no point are we ever given his name and I’m still not quite sure what their relationship is. Overall, though, the story was pretty normal and complacent. Though, I was worried for Sybil’s safety the entire time, something didn’t quite feel right about that situation. I was especially worried when he started talking about the Bananafish drowning, I was afraid he might be foreshadowing something. Yet, in the end, they both return to the shore and Sybil runs off. But, It did feel like Sybil may have known something wasn’t quite right, when she ran off.

The third part of the story then starts and my god did that escalate quickly. The way Salinger did that in so few lines was absolutely shocking. It reminded me a lot of the story “My Old Man” from In Our Time, when the Dad dies so suddenly in the horse racing accident. The end also leaves me with a lot of questions. Who was that girl? Was it the daughter from the start or someone else? Was the young man the boyfriend? I think it was but i’m not quite sure. Also why was he so angry about the girl looking at his feet? Whatever the answers to these questions are, if there are any, J. D Salinger appears to be quite the impressive writer and has managed to enthrall me in a way that Hemingway just couldn’t quite do.

Tales of Being Shot

This chapter Ghost Soldiers provided a very interesting perspective on one of the most iconic war stories: getting shot.  And Tim O’Brien presented us with two different versions of the story, the first didn’t seem so bad, in fact in a perverse way it sounded kinda nice.  He was joking with Rat throughout it and in the end he gets 26 days of R&R. On the flip side the second presented the horror story version of it, where everything that could wrong did go wrong. Here he almost loses his butt, the medic completely fails at his job, and the brotherhood that he had with his comrades collapses.

Overall these stories took me for an emotional joyride, they are just too good to be true. And that reminded me that they probably aren’t… Throughout the book Tim O’Brien has announced that the stories don’t have to be and probably shouldn’t be factually accurate. There are several signs of this in the first story. The way he “falls” into Rat Kiley’s arms, the references to the Gene Autry movies, the way it never even hurts, it's all just too surreal, it seems more like how someone fantasize about getting shot rather than someone who was actually shot.

On the flipside there is the absolutely dreadful experience of being shot in the butt and  then receiving ‘treatment from Bobby Jorgenson. Yet this one seemed more factual to me, it was grittier and more detailed, and as a result felt significantly more realistic. Still, I question his portrayal of Bobby Jorgenson. This chapter frames him as the most incompetent medic to ever wear a U.S military uniform, he forgets to treat for shock, fails to patch the wound correctly, and straight up fails to even go treat him until 10 minutes after he is shot. The portrayal is so negative that it must be biased. Clearly, Tim has a serious revenge complex going on here, just look at the ‘prank’ that occurs later, and I think that this desire for revenge has tainted his memory of what happened. Overall, while I doubt the specifics of the stories in this chapter, I am fairly confident that these are based on events that happened to Tim or someone else in his unit.