Analysis: Sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong

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Rachel Reinke Mrs. Vernon AP LIT 3 April 2014 Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Analysis In Tim O’Brien’s, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, Mary Anne Bell is a spinning image of virtue but her transformation from American “sweetheart” to brutal soldier helps the author convey what is lost in war; innocence. Mary Anne arrived looking like a piece of home wearing “white culottes and a sexy pink sweater” (91). Mark Fossie, her boyfriend, assumed “someday they would get married, live in a house near Lake Erie, and have three children, that was the plan” (95). O’Brien paints the picture of a perfect American girl to illustrate purity but, the author gives Mary Anne a trait that was rare for a woman in that time period, curiosity and wonder. This trait leads to an unsuspecting turn in the “plan” that Fossie had created. Instead of the usual hostility that the novel directs towards women, who betray the men and never fully understand what the soldiers are going through in war, O’Brien allows Mary Anne to relate to the soldiers through her curiosity but not fully. Mary Anne “wanted more, she wanted to penetrate deeper into the mystery of herself, and after a time the wanting became needing, which turned then to craving” (109). The craving lead to her eventually wearing a “necklace of human tongues”…show more content…
She got her hands dirty. The writer included this violent loss of innocence to exaggerate the change that all the young men went through in this war. A change O’Brien himself underwent. Although Mary Anne is content with the person she had become she loses her connection to reality and goes off the deep end, leaving readers wondering what became of her. The writer does this to express it is not important what the ending to the story is, but the fact that she lost herself completely in the war. She and her innocence will never fully be the sweet girl that came to visit her elementary
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