Eternal Internal War

What is war? Is it explicitly limited to an external conflict between two or more countries, or can it be a conflict that occurs within a person’s emotions, thoughts, and beliefs? That question can be pondered by anyone for countless hours without any real sway to either choice, but there a few examples in literature that could prove the latter choice is the more adequate definition of what war is. Novels such as The Things They Carried, Caucasia, and Funny Boy are great examples of the war that occurs within ones self when a person perseveres through tough times.

It seems obvious to first explore a book that, for the most part, takes place in an external war between countries. The Things They Carried is set during the Vietnam War and is told by Tim O’Brien, a soldier who reluctantly went to Vietnam to fight. Saying ‘reluctantly’ is an understatement and his true feelings about joining the war can only be expressed by his own words: “I was a coward. I went to war” (O’Brien 61). This simple statement explains his exact feelings about being drafted, trying to dodge the draft, but then, afraid of what his family and friends would think, going to the war. He felt he was a coward for not sticking to his beliefs and he fought over this for days at a resort just a boat ride away from Canada and, furthermore, freedom from going to Vietnam.

Further into the novel you learn about his conflict within himself when he kills an enemy and actually cares about what he just did. He mentions all of his friends that died along the way such as Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and Kiowa yet never goes into such detail about how he felt personally until he talks about the man that he killed. This is a huge emotional struggle for him as he stares for hours just thinking and, later in life, trying to sort out exactly how he should feel about killing the young man. He describes this by saying “Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t” (O’Brien 134). It seems as if O’Brien will be eternally branded with this internal war that has two simple choices but no simple decision: forgive himself for killing that young man or not.

The book Caucasia, however, discusses an entirely different war, the war for stopping racial prejudice in the United States. Birdie Lee and her sister Cole are two sisters of parents in an interracial marriage. Throughout the novel, Birdie and Cole are left to find out many things on their own about how to live as a biracial person, because their parents are constantly working at being activists in the movement and ignore the fact that life is very tough for these two girls. Sandy Lee, their mother, soon begins to think that the FBI is after her and her militant activist group. She decides it is best if she takes Birdie and flees Boston while Cole goes with her father, Deck, to Brazil. This decision by their mother sparks controversy that will fuel conflict throughout the rest of the book. Birdie has a constant identity struggle as she tries to remember who she really is even though she is told be her mother to hide behind an invisible mask of confusion, in which Birdie is just a white Jewish girl named Jesse. She feels forced to accept this because there is nothing else to believe in the beginning, “There was usually some logic to my mother’s lunacy. So when she told me she had thought up an “ingenious solution” to our problem of hiding, I had no choice but to believe her” (Senna 126). The main conflict within herself, however, is here identity and soon enough she forgets a huge part of her, the language Elemeno that here and Cole had made up, “I mouthed the word ‘shimbala’ at myself un the mirror, It was somewhere between a noun and a command in Elemeno, but I couldn’t remember what it meant” (Senna 180).

More conflict within herself about her identity occurs when Birdie tries to understand that race is more than skin deep. Racial differences and similarities cannot be just defined as simple changes in style or what is “in” at the moment, race goes beyond