I found a very interesting quote in the novel “The Things They Carried” that made me think in a different perspective. “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war.” I found this quote to be interesting because O’Brien relates going to war as being a coward and staying home from war as being brave. At first when I heard these words they made absolutely no sense to me and I thought he had made a typo, but I took time and thought about it thoroughly and It made sense. If everyone is telling you to do something and saying that you are a coward if you don’t do it, then doing it would make you a coward because you fear the way people will treat you if you don’t comply with them. If everyone told you to do something you never thought of and you don’t do it, it doest make you a coward, it makes you brave because you’re taking a stand for something you believe in and not letting people sway you into doing things they want. Remember courage is doing something that you are afraid or scared of doing and doing it anyways.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
wow! way to think this through...that passage interested me as well, because it does take everything you've ever believed about what courage is and turns it on his ear. In fact, in today's world, to say that going to war is cowardly would earn you boos and hisses, not agreement. And, you would be branded "unpatriotic", yet it is challenging to think about life like that. Is not living up to others' expectations actually the most courageous thing we can do?
Post a Comment