Summary
O’Brien relates that on ambushes, and sometimes in bed,
Henry Dobbins wears his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck.
Superstitions are prevalent in Vietnam, and the pantyhose are Dobbins’s good
luck charm. With the pantyhose around his neck, Dobbins survives
tripping over a land mine, and a week later he survives a firefight.
In October, Dobbins’s girlfriend dumps him. Despite the pain of
the rejection, he ties the pantyhose around his neck, remarking
that the magic hasn’t been lost.
Analysis
“Stockings” and “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” are
thematically opposed in their treatment of the relationship between
soldiers and women. While “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” challenges the
idea that manifestations of femininity serve as comforting reminders
of home, “Stockings” enforces it. The story affirms Henry Dobbins’s
notion that his girlfriend’s stockings, which he ties around his
neck, keep him from harm. At the same time, however, it emphasizes
that this tactic is, in the end, nothing but superstition. Dobbins
originally rationalizes wearing the stockings because their smell
and feel remind him of his girlfriend and of a safer world away from
Vietnam. But even after their breakup, he continues to wear the
stockings, contending that their special, protective power has not
been destroyed. Though his ex-girlfriend no longer offers herself as
a source of comfort to him, he continues to perceive her as one.
O’Brien shows how American soldiers order their experience
by superstition rather than by rationality. To the soldiers in Vietnam, superstition
became a kind of religion, a faith that might save them individually
from the ironic twists of fate omnipresent in the mysterious jungle.
Dobbins’s girlfriend comes to exist for him in the realm of superstition;
she becomes more of an imagined symbol than a real person. When
she breaks up with Dobbins through a letter, her abandonment has
no bearing on the protective power of the mystical stockings, since
it is what she represents rather than who she is that endows them
with their significance.
O’Brien doesn’t use a satirical or ridiculing tone when
describing Dobbins and his belief, despite its seeming inconsistency
and implausibility. Indeed, in the end, Dobbins does survive the
war, perhaps because the stockings keep him motivated to survive
by giving him a reminder of home. In any case, the belief in the
power of the stockings is more important than the objective truth
of their power. Because the stockings cushion Dobbins from reality,
they improve his psychological condition. With “Stockings,” O’Brien contends
that rationally thinking men can be made to think irrationally in
order to preserve their well-being.
