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Mary Anne's Transformation In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong - Paper

Mary Anne's Transformation In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong

Mary Anne Bell arrives in Vietnam wearing culottes and a pink sweater, the girl next door, but in a matter of weeks she's wearing "a necklace of human tongues," and has become a predator "ready for the kill." What do you think of Mary Anne's transformation?
In Tim O' Brien's "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," from The Things They Carried, the young American woman Mary Anne Bell at first comes to represent all the soldiers have lost in their descent into the Vietnam jungle and all that they dream of recovering upon returning home. Mary Anne is beautiful and lovely. She full of the freshness of middle America. She is inappropriately dressed for the life that the soldiers lead, but she ...

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indicates, that even the most beautiful creature becomes twisted when exposed to horrors. She becomes emblematic of the soldier's own consciences and collective conscience.
However, Mary Anne's transformation has an added element of politics to it. Mary Anne is not just a pretty girl. She is "the girl next door," the symbol of a conventional American life. That conventional American married life that the soldiers hoped to lead is destroyed because of their own increasingly jaded mentality. Now there is nothing for the soldiers to return back home to. Even the girl next door has become tainted with the vices of Vietnam.
Mary Anne's quickness to become a predator also represents something about the relationship of her home country of America and Vietnam. Because of her sexual and political innocence, she is also quicker to believe the lies she has been told about the Vietnam conflict. Her innocence makes her more rather than less susceptible to corruption and to ...

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Mary Anne's Transformation In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. (2015, December 11). Retrieved January 22, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Mary-Annes-Transformation-Sweetheart-Song-Tra/105267

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"Mary Anne's Transformation In Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." Essayworld.com. December 11, 2015. Accessed January 22, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Mary-Annes-Transformation-Sweetheart-Song-Tra/105267.

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 12/11/2015 08:34:24 AM
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 811
Pages: 3

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