Sunday, December 2, 2012

Why is the girl dancing in chapter 14 of The Things They Carried?

In "Style," the fourteenth story in The Things They Carried, a young Vietnamese girl dances through the wreckage of her burned village. The fact that her parents are also dead makes her actions all the more incomprehensible, not least to the American soldiers who've just destroyed her village and killed her family. They speculate as to why she could be dancing in the midst of such horror. Azar thinks it may be some kind of ritual; maybe the girl just likes dancing, thinks Dobbins.
There doesn't seem to be a good reason for the girl's dancing. But then much the same could be said of Dobbins's wearing of his girlfriend's stockings round his neck. In both cases, something familiar, something that reminds each person of life before the war, is being used as a kind of talisman, a way of warding off the daily horrors of this bloody and destructive conflict.

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