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Mary Anne Bell Character Analysis

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Our surrounding influence our lives and characters as much as fate, destiny or any supernatural agency. Some surroundings can be very extreme, one of those would be to live in a war era. One great example would be the novel "The things they carried" (by Tim O'Brien) as it presents us with a blunt view of the Vietnam war. Each story in the book presents us with a new direction on how human mind deal with situations like death, life, war and friendship, but no story struck me as quite hard as "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong". One of the main character is "Mary Anne Bell" who O'Brien uses as an example to develop his theme on how a human nature changes while reacting to different cultural, physical or environmental factors. Very early in the story, O'Brien establishes the theme (how certain surroundings affect our lives and characters) through the description of geographical surroundings. The setting takes place in a small medical detachment up in the mountains west of Chu Lai, near the village of Tra Bong (pg86) where one of the young medics named Mark Fossie made some arrangements to bring his girlfriend (Mary Anne Bell) to the base. O'Brien describes the base to be surrounded by forests and mountains. He also states that, since it is a forest …show more content…

In this story, O’Brien paints a highly conventionalized version of Vietnam as a world that deeply affects the foreign Americans who live in it. He outlines a strong difference between the native world of Vietnam and the world of the Americans. Mary Anne Bell fully embraces Vietnamese culture, while Mark Fossie ignores it. The difference between their experiences sets up a world in which the separate cultures are completely foreign to, and incompatible with each other. O’Brien does not suggest that one can assimilate elements of each culture into a comfortable mix. Rather, the characters must choose a single cultural

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