courage

Speaking Of Courage speaks of courage in a reflective manner.  Norman Bowker talks about what he didn’t do, not what he did.  In my eyes he was way too hard on himself.  Speaking Of Courage is about Kiowa’s death and how Bowker feels about it.  It is also about how courage isn’t always rewarded.  He fought bravely in the Vietnam War, but now nobody besides his father gave him the time of day.  Bowker thinks that what he didn’t do was courageous, making him cowardly.  The book has a definition of courage as what one felt is best.  Obrien thinks he wasn’t courageous cause he didn’t run away from the draft.  Though the definition of courage is moot, I see courage as being honorable and honest.  It is doing what you are supposed to do and not bitching out under any circumstance.  If you get drafted, the only courageous way you can get of it is refusing to go and accepting responsibility and facing the consequences and penalties you have to.  Running away isn’t the courageous way out, but that’s under my interpretation.  Ive learned that people have many different views of courage, and a situation has to be examined from multiple angles before we can say it was courageous or not.  There is no reason to prefer my interpretation to anybody else’s interpretation of what courage means. I think the way Bowker frames the story of Kiowa isn’t courageous.  He frames it as how he almost won the silver star, which is an award for courage.  He really is trying to tell the story of how Kiowa died.  Masking the real significance of the story is cowardly.  It is hiding what he is trying to convey, making him a liar, thus a coward, in this instance, but what he did in Vietnam was neither cowardly, nor outstandingly courageous.  He tried to save Kiowa, or atleast wanted to, and took responsibility for his death.  The fact that he takes responsibility for Kiowa’s death when there is a chance he couldn’t save him makes him courageous as well.

VOCAB WORD: MOOT used about 2/5 of the way though the blog.