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in the lake of the woods. ... But it may be that "In the Lake of the Woods" is the kind
of novel whose ambitions are less important than its concessions. ...
In The Lake Of The Woods. "?It wasn't just the war that made him what he
was. That's too easy. It was everything ? his whole nature ...
... Also the lines “Between the woods and frozen lake,” “The darkest evening of the
year,” and “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” The narrator ...
... He speaks of isolation, "between the woods and frozen lake" and of duty "But I have
promises to keep". And also, Frost's usage of "sleep" easily implies death. ...
... Another closely related example of symbolism is "Between the woods and
the frozen lake". The woods are now a symbol of life ? a ...
Submitted by jesus121212 on June 3, 2007
Category: English
Words: 2503 | Pages: 11
Views: 458
Popularity Rank: 20,000
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hat stories can do, I guess, is make things present." That's how Tim O'Brien put it in "The Things They Carried," which was published in 1990 and which is one of the finest books, fact or fiction, written about the Vietnam War. I don't remember ever hearing a novelist make a more modest claim for the power of stories, at least not a novelist of Mr. O'Brien's stature. The statement itself -- stories make things present -- is unassuming, and it is offered to the reader diffidently, as if the writer were about to deny the possibility of saying anything useful at all about stories. Perhaps it suggests the discomfort of a storyteller who has, for the moment, slipped outside his story, except that outside his story is where Tim O'Brien has nearly always been, taking refuge -- as he says in his striking new novel, "In the Lake of the Woods" -- "in the fine line between biology and spirit," between some literal, if unknowable, truth and the truth whose only evidence is the story that contains it.
These are important matters in Mr. O'Brien's previous works. In the 1978 novel "Going After Cacciato," the reader comes to worry about the difference between a story that is merely implausible -- a platoon of soldiers following a man on foot from Vietnam to Paris -- and a story that is unbelievable precisely because it is true, a story of the Vietnam War itself, a war that seemed to contain every likelihood of improbability. In "The Things They Carried," the storyteller's indeterminacy has grown. The narrator of those stories distinguishes between "story-truth" and "happening-truth," and he plays one against the other. For Mr. O'Brien, as for many other Vietnam veterans, the "happening-truth" is a terrible thing; it is too powerful to look at, though you are forced to witness it. And yet, in Mr. O'Brien's case, it has dwindled over time into what he calls "faceless responsibility and faceless grief," which story-truth has the power to help him accept and alleviate.
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