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Analysis of Mary Anne Bell: O'Brien, Tim, 14
Analysis of Mary Anne Bell: O'Brien, Tim, 14
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Mary Anne Bell symbolizes the stranger, somebody who does not fit where she is when
she is within the American troops who are in vietnam. Mary Anne's narrative exemplifies what
occurs when someone's circumstances have an impact on them, similar to Rat Kiley's disturbed
reaction to exclusively doing operations at night in "Night Life." Mary Anne also represents
transition, namely the loss of innocence in the face of life's hardships. Mary Anne is greener than
any of the other characters in the novel, similar to the "green" physician Jorgenson, who is prone
to errors (O'Brien, Tim, 14). She comes to Vietnam unprepared for combat and hesitant to fight.
Her change from a charming girl in culottes to an liken an animal predator wearing a tongue
necklace reflects and overstresses the alteration that all fledgling men in Vietnam underwent,
such as "O'Brien," who changed from a schoolkid to a man considering a savage reprisal against
Jorgenson.
O'Brien passes over the ending of Mary Anne's narrative instead of allowing her identity
to drift into legend. Rather than understanding what happens to someone (like himself) who
experiences a tragic loss of innocence, we are left to speculate on how war impacts a person and
how long that person will be impacted by it (O'Brien, Tim, 20). Mary Anne's narrative has an
aspect of "knowledge" in that once innocence is gone, it can never be recovered. When Mary
Anne loses her innocence, she becomes an essential instinct agent, unlike O'Brien and Bowker.
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Finally, Mary Anne is the most authentic depiction of love in the story. Even though Lt.
Cross and Henry Dobbins have love trinkets, Mark Fossie is the lone fighter who conveys his
lover to him (O'Brien, Tim, 38). Her fast transformation from fiancée as well as mistress to
fighter is the novel's most obvious sampele of O'Brien's connection of war and love. To O'Brien,
truth is an sentiment, much as Alpha Company believed in Mary Anne's narrative while knowing
they couldn't totally trust the narrator, Rat Kiley. Love and war, according to O'Brien, are not
just linked; they are also the identical in that they all decline to let life get in the way of feeling.
Mary Anne is one of the novel's "rightest" characters since she feeds off her sentiments in
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