"Cada Cabeza es un Mundo"

It is said that every head is a world. Each person knows only how he or she views the world around them and nothing of the views of the next person. It is only in literature that we can explore the varying view points of people as individuals. It is in literature that we be free to think outside ourselves and see the world through the eyes of another. With literature gain a better understanding of our own thoughts, our own dreams, and our own fears. In “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, we march with a boy through his jarring shift into the responsibilities of adulthood. In “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, we watch a man’s viewpoint change. In “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, we see a mother wishing that her daughter would know that she’s not helpless, hinting that the mother had felt the same.

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the main character of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, is madly in love with a girl named Martha. Jimmy is so in love with her that he would pretend that she loved him too, even though he knew that she really didn’t.

Mr. O’Brien further displays the depth to which the character Jimmy takes his self-delusion, writing, “He had difficulty keeping his attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into his daydreams…” (O’Brien, 421) This level of distraction is dangerous in any setting, but even more so in the situation Jimmy Cross finds himself, in the Vietnam War. Amid the lists of things the soldiers had to carry, O’Brien takes the briefest of moments to foreshadow Jimmy’s realization with the following two sentences:

O’Brien has Jimmy’s shift, the realization of the danger his self-made distraction, come from the death of one of the men under his command, Ted Lavender. “Lieutenant Cross felt the pain,” O’Brien wrote of Jimmy’s budding insight, and it heralded the guilt that finally carries Jimmy to his transformation. (O’Brien, 419)

Jimmy’s transformation takes him away from the child-like actions of waste and daydream toward the consequence-minded responsibility of an adult. O’Brien lets us look into the affects of Jimmy’s child-like attitude by showing us the waster of the unit as a whole as he writes, “Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same…” (O’Brien, 424) There’s a marked lack of weight associated with this action. The soldiers didn’t have the maturity to carry on despite the weight of things pressing down on them. It was with the death of Ted Lavender that Jimmy sees that “He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” (O’Brien, 425)

Even as one character in my readings grows from child to adult, another is maturing in a different way. In “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver, we watch a man’s viewpoint of the world and his relation to it changes. The narrator in “Cathedral” begins the story blind, in a sense, to the grand scale and beauty of the world around hi. His eyes function, as any other person’s would, but he is wrapped up in his own small view of the world, so much so that he seems blind to everything else.

“He was no one I knew,” wrote Raymond Carver in the voice of the narrator of the story when the narrator’s wife told him of their so-to-be houseguest. (Carver, 90) It’s clear from this sentence that the narrator is uncomfortable outside his own well-defined and known world. Even when the narrator and his wife sat down to listen to one of the tapes from Robert, the blind man, the narrator was shocked to hear his own name coming from Robert’s voice on the tape. It clearly disturbed him to have a blind man whom he’d never met speak about him. When the narrator and his wife get interrupted and never manage to get back to the tape, the narrator seems uneasily relieved, in Carver’s passage, “I’d heard all I wanted to. Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.” (Carver, 92) This sentiment carries on through the dinner conversation, as the narrator “waited in vain to hear [his] name on [his] sweet wife’s lips..” (Carver, 95)

The narrator’s turning point comes to him in small skips throughout their evening, as he makes small admissions to himself. “I remembered having read somewhere that the blind didn’t smoke because, …they couldn’t see the smoke they exhaled. I thought I knew that much about blind people.” (Carver, 94) “I watched with admiration as he used his knife and fork on the meat.” (Carver, 95) The narrator feels further rapport with Robert when stay up to watch TV together. On TV is a late night show about cathedrals. At first, the narrator is silent, watching the show without comment, but the way Robert is sitting unnerves him. Robert sat with his head turned to point his right ear to the TV, which angled his face toward the narrator. Compelled, the narrator finally spoke up, trying to describe what he was seeing, what a cathedral looked like.

The narrator’s epiphany is not the blinding touch of insight of Jimmy in O’Brien’s story, but rather in Carver’s ”Cathedral”, the narrator’s understand comes in the form of the hours long drawn session with Robert. Robert suggested that they draw a cathedral when he heard the frustration that was implied in the word choice of Carver’s text as the narrator gives up trying to describe a cathedral. At Robert’s suggestion and prodding, the narrator moves off to collect the needed materials and they sit together to draw. Robert holds the narrator’s hand, verbally leading him through the drawing. When the drawing is done, the narrator is left with a sense of being a part of something more than himself, and his elation can be felt in Carver’s words “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.” (Carver, 101)

The final story, Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” shows a mother wishing that her daughter would know that she’s not helpless which hints that the mother had felt the same at some point in her life. “I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron,” the mother, our story’s narrator, states at the start of the tale to an unseen audience. (Olsen, 467) She’s talking to someone, by the tone, but she’s always talking to herself as the story continues and she wonders if she’s being asked about her daughter “…because I am her mother [and] I have a key…” (Olsen, 467) However, the mother admits that she can’t see into her daughter’s life since “There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.” (Olsen, 467)

Unlike the other two stories, where we get to walk through the journey of self discovery, the mother in “I Stand Here Ironing” has already had hers and the journey is one of sadly recalling how long it took to learn what was learned. We get to see all those decisions made by an indecisive young mother, from feedings to daycare to hospitalization. We can feel the heartache in the choices she has to make at the time, and see what she sees in her daughter’s expressions and actions that were born from the lack of warmth and love she had given to her other children later in life. In the end, the mother wanted her audience, this mysterious unseen figure to “…help [my daughter] to know – help make it so there is cause for her to know – that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.” The mother, with this admission, felt helpless and crushed under all the choices she had made that didn’t allow her to spend as much time with her daughter as her daughter may have needed when she was younger.

The jarring shift that we see as Jimmy Cross in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” had to me, and just like the first lieutenant, I can give a specific date for mine: January 8, 2008. It was about 8 o’clock at night, after the c-section, and I’m lying in the recovery room, waiting:

I hadn’t realized that shift was so dramatic until a full year after that moment, when I was rereading some of my journal entries, of which the above is one, and writing a year in review sort of thing for a letter to my family living across the state and in other countries.

Years later, as I take time from homework to work on scholarship essays, I find myself constantly returning to my life as a mother. My viewpoint of the world has changed. I think, even three years ago, before my daughter was born, I was very concerned with myself. I was blind to the importance of thinking outside myself and my immediate surroundings. Like the narrator in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” it took being lead by the hand to see clearly. For the narrator in “Cathedral”, it was a blind man. For me, it was my child.

My child now means more to me than anything else. Weekly, I find myself sitting next to my husband and starting a discussion about how we should work things out to our daughter’s benefit. We discuss schools and books and movies and all sorts of things. I know that at times, I feel helpless, wishing I had known more or known better. The only thing I can do is make the best for my daughter as she grows. I am so very like the mother in “I Stand Here Ironing”, only I am blessed that I can read the story, feel what she felt, and learn to make better choices, hoping before my daughter is impacted negatively.