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Analysis of Mary Anne Bell

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

addition to moves smoothly among war and love postures.

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Works Cited

O'brien, Tim. The things they carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.