The+Loss+of+Innocence

media type="custom" key="2086849" One of the main themes of the novel is the attraction of war. This idea is common in war literature but it is made more complex here as O’Brien adds the layers of a [|Conrad-esque] “heart of darkness” fascination in the character of Mary Anne Bell. The seductive allure of war is linked to human nature in the stories. War, more specifically the act of killing, can be seen as a catalyst for some characters, causing them to become primal versions of themselves, to become less human, to become killing machines. O’Brien revisits this idea numerous times throughout the book. A clear example of this is Mary Anne Bell and she is a character who deliberately strove for cultural immersion. Mary Anne actively sought out the ways of the Vietnamese, not just to observe from a distance, but to participate in if possible. Mary Anne, becomes so much a part of the landscape of Vietnam that she becomes “unnatural” to Mark and Rat. For example, the humming they hear coming from the Greenies’ hut is freaky and unnatural, somehow not human, but it is Mary Anne’s humming. Mary Anne as a female, should be “domesticated” and behave in accordance with the readers’ expectations of a young woman in a decade prior to the women’s liberation movement. Instead she is seduced by the foreign landscape of Vietnam—one which “O’Brien” resists and barely describes—and is reduced to her animal-like primal self, a killing machine. Mary Anne shows no resistance to the landscape, and has the agility and skill to slip into the jungle like a predatory jungle animal ready for the hunt. O’Brien like [|Joseph Conrad] uses symbolism to connect the landscape of Vietnam to the landscape of immorality that Mary Anne succumbs to and “O’Brien” resists. Mary Anne becomes a part of what O’Brien/“O’Brien” opposes the most and what O’Brien/“O’Brien” most fears: the struggle between the light and dark forces of human nature and the predominance of the darker forces. Mary Anne echoes Conrad’s character, [|Kurtz] and “O’Brien” is similar to Conrad’s character, [|Marlow]. Like Marlow, O’Brien struggles against his imagination and the fantastic cultural stories that feed it, in “O’Brien’s” case, the stories of World War II he learned from movies and stories of his father’s generation. Ultimately, O’Brien shields himself from a fate similar to Mary Anne’s through the way he employs stories, just as he did during the summer when he worked at the meatpacking plant, by forcing him to look at the struggle between dark and light within himself.