Title: "The Lives of the Dead" page 225
Significance:
The last story in O'Brien's book has the purpose of wrapping up and making sense of all of the other stories told throughout the book. This short story tells us to remember the good parts of life, even though O'Brien no longer has Linda he continues to dream and think of her in happy situations. This story focuses on O'Brien's personal story and thoughts rather then what is happening in the war. This is so important because it explains the relationship between the living and the dead which is necessary to fully understand a war story.
Themes:
Avoiding weakness - The men do whatever they can to seem strong and avoid being called vulnerable, even if it means seeming like a bad person.
Remembrance - O'Brien refuses to forget his past and the people in it even if they have passed on, he does this best thought his dreams as well as story telling.
Quotes:
Page 238 "We had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was ... We transformed the bodies into piles of waste. When someone got killed as Curt Lemon did, his body was not really a body, but rather a small bit of waste in the midst of a much wider wastage."
This quote is significant because it relates to the theme of avoiding weakness; the men in this story will do whatever they have to be called or looked upon as strong, even if they look like bad people in the process. When the men shake hands with a dead man they seem like uncaring people but they are only doing this to look powerful on the outside even though on the inside they may be quite cowardly. This is their way of coping with death, if the men imagine dead bodies as garbage they have an easier time accepting the fact that the man has passed on.
Pages 245-246 "I loved her and she died ... I can still see her as if I'm gazing into some other world ... Sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow flood lights. I'm young and happy and I'll never die I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, doing spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
This quote is important because it relates to the theme of remembrance. O'Brien is constantly trying to relive happy memories of himself and Linda as well as make up new ones in a feeble attempt to keep her alive. O'Brien tells stories and dreams of happy times because he is not satisfied with his current life. He says he is trying to save the life of himself as a child because those were favorable times of his life. O'Brien claims that people can live forever through stories, as long as they are remembered as alive and well or in a happy state the author believes that the dead can metaphorically walk among the living.
Questions:
1) O'Brien was urged to joke about the dead man but refused, in your opinion does this make him a good person and the other soldiers bad people?
2) When Linda died the children said she "kicked the bucket" how is it similar to how the soldiers deal with death?
Answers:
1) The soldiers who joked about the dead man are not necessarily bad people, joking and shaking hands with the man is simply their way of coping with his loss. O'Brien is not necessarily a good person for not disrespecting the dead body, his way of coping with death is just different than that of the other men. The men would rather joke and look manly but O'Brien handles death in a different way. He would rather remember the deceased with times when they were happy and still living.
2) The children find it easier to imagine Linda kicking a bucket full of physical water then actually dying. The children are simply coping with death and need a way to deal with it since death is such a serious and emotional topic. This is comparable to the soldiers because they have a similar way of coping with death. The soldiers pretend that the dead bodies are simply garbage to avoid the brutal truth that a fellow man is dead. This story proves that no matter what age, people have a hard time accepting death and find ways to block it out and make it seem fake or unreal.