Translation of Guaman Poma Ch.31

Considered Christian. Primarily serving God and then his majesty and then our neighbors then all evil and harm in a strange land and since you don’t serve our God nor the Virgin Marry or the saints, angels, then how some steal from one another and they are proud and stakeholders and do not keep the commandments of God nor to the Holy Mother Iglecia de Roma.  And you know that there is Heaven and Hell and you don’t walk fairly. And that is how I consider everything in our friendship.

The model of this chapter is the ascetic literature and the religious rules of that time, the moral and religious meditations would be formally organized in “considerations” with frequency throughout the work of fray Luis de Granada, one of the favorite authors of Guaman Poma; see pages 109, 369, 954, 955 and Adorno, 1980 [Bib], [1986] 2000 [Bib]. Guaman Poma is concerned for social behavior, not spirituality like genera shaped that is mimicked and he directs many of his “considerations” to the king of Spain (pp. 947-948) and the majority of his accusations are to the Spanish colonists.

   

The Things They Carried- Comparative Final Essay #6

The Things They Carried

     In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is about O’Brien’s experiences in the Vietnam War. It is a complex story where he shares the many things that he encountered while he was in Vietnam. O’Brien shares his reactions from the time he gets drafted to when he is involved in combat to his life while he writes the novel after the Vietnam War ended. Two chapters that have a similar theme and can be compared and contrasted are “How to tell a true war story” and “The man I killed”.  

     In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” where Rat writes a letter to his friends sister because he died.  He wrote that his friend Curt Lemon would always volunteer for numerous things that no other soldier would think of volunteering for. Rat goes on and on about what a good person his friend was. After he sent the letter to Curt Lemon’s sister Rat never got a reply from her. In this chapter it states that a true war story does not give a way of living for others and that if it seems to teach the reader something not to believe it because it is not true because a war story does not teach a moral it just states what happened in the war.

     In the chapter “Spin” the war is viewed differently and it is also explained differently from the rest of the novel. O’Brien writes “The war wasn’t all terror and violence.” O’Brien goes on by explaining things that some soldiers would do like two soldiers who would play checkers before they went to bed Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker it was almost like a ritual for them and then they would dig a foxhole and if they got bored they would play more silent games while the sky changed colors from pink to purple. In this chapter O’Brien also explains to the reader that he is an older man now and that he cannot write on another subject that is not the Vietnam War even though it has been a long time since the Vietnam War.  In this chapter everything that O’Brien explains seems realistic and if it did happen and it does not seem like if it has been made up or even embellished to make the story better.

     Many things in the novel of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien have some sort of truth behind them. Numerous stories that are in the novel sound very realistic and truthful. On the other hand other stories also in the novel seem too embellished or made up with just a hint of truth to them. Some chapters focus on more realistic events that actually happened and others are interesting and eye catching but seem like they are not what happened nor truthful.