Is Anybody Home/The Things they Carried

I was particularly intrigued by the part of Vivian Sobchack’s essay “Is Anybody Home?” in which she describes her personal experience of her amputated leg. The reason I was intrigued by this part of the essay is because she constantly describes how she had to operate her body consciously… “Ultimately I learned to walk by locating myself and being on “my” side of my body—that is, not by seeing my body as an image of me, but feeling my body image as me.” The reason this intrigued me is because it shows that she exiled herself from her body to operate her prosthetic leg. She was able to remove herself from her body and see it from a different angle to fully conquer the problem she had with the prosthetic leg. This belief is seen in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien as well, in the novel we see that when they are removed from the war setting they are constantly haunted by the fact that they had to “toughen up” (for lack of better words) when surrounded by the other men of Alpha Company. They are exiled because of the horrors they witnessed when they had to change basically their humanity to be able to cope with the dread and fear they faced constantly in and off the battlefield.