. . . when I take a high leap into the
dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying
to save Timmy's life with a story.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
O’Brien has been at war for only four days when the platoon
is fired on by a village near the South China Sea. Cross orders
an air strike and the platoon watches the village burn. Dave Jensen
pokes fun at a dead old man whose right arm has been blown off and
encourages O’Brien to do the same, to “show a little respect for
your elders.” O’Brien refuses, and Kiowa tells him he’s done the
right thing. He asks if the old man was O’Brien’s first experience
with a dead body, and O’Brien says no, thinking of his first date,
Linda.
During the spring of 1956, O’Brien
was in love with nine-year-old Linda, his beautifully fragile schoolmate
who had taken to wearing a red cap everywhere. He arranged for his
parents to take him and Linda to the movies, to see The
Man Who Never Was—a World War II film that contained an
image of a corpse falling into the sea. When the movie was over,
and the two couples had made a stop at Dairy Queen, they dropped
Linda off, and the fourth-grade O’Brien knew then that he was in
love.
Linda continued to wear her red cap every day, despite
being taunted for it. One day a fellow classmate, Nick Veenhof,
pulled off the cap, revealing Linda’s slowly balding head. Linda
said nothing. O’Brien later explains that Linda had a brain tumor
and soon died. He had known she was sick, but Nick was the one to
break the news, saying O’Brien’s girlfriend had “kicked the bucket.”
O’Brien went to the funeral home with his father and marveled at
how strange and unreal it was to see Linda’s body in a casket. He
stared for a while, saying nothing, until his father, unable to
address the situation, proposed a trip to the ice cream store. Later,
O’Brien became withdrawn and obsessed with falling asleep. In daydreams
and night dreams, he could make up stories about Linda, imagine
her, and bring her back to life. In those dreams, Linda comforted O’Brien,
telling him that it didn’t matter that she was dead.
O’Brien says that in Vietnam, the soldiers devised ways
to make the dead seem less dead—they kept them alive with stories,
such as the stories of Ted Lavender’s tranquilizer use or Curt Lemon’s
trick-or-treating. O’Brien remembers that he saw Linda’s body in
the funeral home, but that it upset him because it didn’t seem real.
He says that he picked Curt Lemon out of a tree and watched Kiowa sink
into the muck of the Song Tra Bong, but that he still dreamed Linda
alive in stories and in dreams. In his dreams, when he was young,
Linda waited for him and stayed alive, if just sometimes obscured
by other things happening. In stories, O’Brien concludes, the dead
live.
Analysis
Though the work’s final statement seems to have little
to do with Vietnam, its relevance lies in its addressing of the
intimate relationship between death and life. O’Brien uses “The
Lives of the Dead” to illustrate that his war narrative has a larger
purpose than simply showing readers what it was like to be in a
war. Interspersed throughout this story are smaller stories about
death in Vietnam that lead back to the story of O’Brien himself—a
man who writes in order to make sense of his life, especially in
relation to others’ deaths. But at the forefront is the story of
O’Brien’s first love and of his first realization that fiction can
overcome death.
The character of Linda, for the narrator, is synonymous
with his loss of innocence. With her, he experiences both love and
death for the first time, at the same time. In the story, she first
represents the promise of childhood—delicate and beautiful, she
agrees to go with him and his parents to the movies. When her balding
head is revealed, and later her corpse, Linda’s innocence—and O’Brien’s, by
association—is lost forever.
