Bowker, Bell, Borders: Crossing to ‘The Other Side’ in Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried"

November 21, 2019

As a phrase, the other side has two meanings. It signifies physical distance, as in ‘the other side’ of the world, as well as spiritual distance; when someone dies, we say they have crossed through to ‘the other side.’ In his novel, O’Brien uses the phrase to symbolise the ‘otherness’ of Vietnam in relation to America, creating a metaphorical framework that links two characters—Mary Anne Bell and Norman Bowker—in their spiritual and physical passage into Vietnam.

The first use of the phrase occurs at the end of ‘Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong’ as O’Brien’s assessment of Mary Anne Bell’s final state, her transformation from American girl to Vietnamese commando: “She had crossed to the other side,” he writes (110). While the line seems to refer to her change post-Vietnam (i.e. a psychological movement rather than a physical one), the statement is still grounded in the physical as Rat contextualises his assessment of what happened to her in the broader context of every soldier in the war: “You come over clean … and afterward its never the same” (109). To simply travel to Vietnam is to come over to the other side, in the first meaning of the phrase. However, the point of distinction in Bell’s case is that the language of her physical crossing is mapped onto the geography of her consciousness. As Rat explains, her experience is unique in that travelling to the other side of the world brings her to “the far side” of her mind—a psychological “trip” to “another hemisphere” sparked by her trip to the Eastern Hemisphere (109). The parallel nature of both these movements suggests that her new realm of consciousness is in the same mental or spiritual location as Vietnam itself—that they are intertwined in their ‘other-side-ness.’ There has been a transference of consciousness in the phrase’s second meaning, such that the Mary Anne of America no longer exists. “She’s already gone,” Rat says (107). Vietnam is a place that can kill not just physically, but spiritually, in a mutual surrender of body and mind to place, in which the border before ‘the other side’ is summited entirely. This is why Bell’s fate is ambiguous; she does not die a bodily death, as Curt Lemon or Tim Lavender or Kiowa did—collected and shipped home—but disappears entirely: “No body was ever found” (110). She is subsumed entirely into the place, a death that makes her “part of the land” (110), “of the Song Tra Bong” itself (85).

When O’Brien uses the phrase for the second and only other time, he invokes this same metaphorical framework, mapping it onto the geography of Norman Bowker’s post-war life. This is seen in the fact that Bowker’s movement through the story is liminal, driving atop a road: the physical “boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent” (132). On one side lies the lake, but “on the other side of the road,” lies Sally Kramer, his former love living the quintessential American life: “married… in a pleasant blue house” (133). This characterization of one side of the road as American implies that its inverse—the other, other side of the road—is Vietnam. This aligns the lake also with the second meaning of ‘the other side’ as a place of death, beyond the fine line separating it from life, from America. Just as Vietnam killed the members of Alpha Company, so too had “the lake ... drowned” Bowker’s friend Max Arnold, “who liked to talk about the existence of God” (132) and “who loved fine lines” (147). This suggests the lake is both a place of death and of heavenly grace; it is even explicitly said to be “graceful” (132) and described in terms of a fine line, a binary division between light and dark: “one half still glisten[ing],” with “the other … caught in shadow” (144). Bowker’s cyclical movement, dancing on the boundary between these two opposite sides, is thus symbolic of his inner conflict: his mind is stuck on the other side of the world, which is why he feels “[he] got killed over in Nam” (150), finding the town “remote” despite being as close as he could possibly be to it (133). His physical self, disconnected from his inner self in Vietnam, is unable to pass back onto the American side of the road associated with Sally, recognizing that “there was really nothing he could say to her” (133). He cannot be in two different worlds at once. His final choice at the end of the story, to leave the liminal road-space for Lake Vietnam, could thus be seen as his attempt to reconcile these two halves of himself. This is why “he put[s] his head”—the seat of his mind—“under” the water, where it belongs (148). This is why he “open[s] his lips … for the taste” (148), just as Mary Anne sought to “eat [Vietnam] … to swallow the whole country—the dirt, the death” (106). It is a metaphorical statement of intent, a symbolic suicide. Bowker takes the death-lake into himself that he might become a part of the land as she did; his tongue hangs around Bell’s throat, poised to consume Vietnam as Vietnam consumed them both. And so when he hangs himself by the throat on the next page (149), abandoning the dissonance of his physicality for pure spirituality, it is of little surprise. He finally and fully passes through to the other side.