Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Christopher Michael McDonough

Critical Essay by Christopher Michael McDonough

SOURCE: McDonough, Christopher Michael. “‘Afraid to Admit We Are Not Achilles’: Facing Hector's Dilemma in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.”¹ Classical and Modern Literature 20, no. 3 (spring 2000): 23-32.

In the following essay, McDonough utilizes “the tragedy of Hector” from the Iliad to glean insight into The Things They Carried.

“The war, like Hector's own war, was silly and stupid.”

—Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, 145

What has Troy to do with Vietnam? In recent years, the pertinence of the one Asian war to the other has been powerfully argued by numerous scholars, notably Jonathan Shay, in his seminal study, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Athenaeum, 1994), as well as by various authors responding to Shay in a special issue of Classical Bulletin 71.2 (1995), “Understanding Achilles.” As can be seen in the titles here mentioned, the...
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