[Download] [Up]

            For my paper on “Innocence Lost”, I chose to answer question 5 on page 1055. In order to answer this question, I chose to explore “The Things They Carried” and examine its relation to the question.

            In the story, we follow the character of Jimmy Cross, a young man taken away and thrown into the middle of a war he doesn’t feel like he’s a part of. So discontent with his physical placement, he often separates himself from the physical world and lives in one of fantasy in order to not have to confront the situation he’s in. The majority of his fantasies involve what he thinks life would be like if he were back home and things were all as he wished them to be. He becomes so lost in his dreams that he becomes negligent in his duties as squad commander and ultimately a man’s life is lost, which serves as a catalyst to take him from his made-up world and bring him back to the forefront.

            While the reality of the situation may be that Lieutenant Cross is in the humid, violent, uncertain jungles of Vietnam, in his own mind he is back in America, in his home, surrounded by the thing that he finds most comforting. To be at home isn’t always to be there physically, as he still finds his strength in the memories or illusions of a home he never actually had. When he lets himself retreat back into his dreams, he’s always taken back to the girl he feels he left behind, the girl of his dreams. He knows that this is not the reality of the situation, and that Martha never really loved him in that way anyway, but in his pursuit of comfort, he allows himself to be fooled by his own delusions. Back away in the mountains of Virginia, with Martha walking by his side, Jimmy allows himself run away from the war in the only way he can allow himself to. Too afraid to be scared, to give in to fear, he cannot escape the war in person. He sees this as the way of the coward, behavior not befitting a man like himself, but he still longs for the protection of home, of the things that he once had and hopes to hold again. His only way out is to think back to the way life used to be, to his starting point, to home. When home is no longer the most ideal place, he starts to fill in details, to make his wishes and hopes into a hidden reality, pretending that all these perfect things really would happen, or that they had a chance to occur.

            His dearest wishes, of course, revolve around Martha and how he wishes she would be his. Jimmy takes it to the point of even experiencing jealousy over men he supposes must exist, who he imagines must be dating the girl he wishes he had. As Martha starts to become Jimmy’s home, the place he retreats to in order to escape from the all-too-real pressures of his life, he becomes more aggressive and defensive, even to the extent of wishing he had done more to take Martha as a part of himself.

            As the story comes to a conclusion and Jimmy confronts the harsh reality he lives within, he realizes that he cannot hold onto Martha any longer, that he cannot continue thinking back to his home and wishing he were there. He must confront the world he’s in, not simply for his own life, but for the safety of the men he has been entrusted with. In order to do so, he must let everything about her go and move on. He experiences similar feelings to those of a child first moving out on their own. To lose the safety-net in his life is dangerous, but he can never move on or do the right thing if he’s always holding onto the past. Instead of finding a new dwelling, however, Jimmy must first leave his old home, setting fire to his images and letters of Martha, discarding her good-luck stone, and letting go of his dreams, and create a new one in himself. To do this, he reaches up to his next-closest family, the Army, and decides to build within himself the stoic home of a soldier, to seek comfort and security in the bearing and discipline of the Army instead of the arms of a girl who he never truly knew.