Enjoyed the not concrete ending!

After reading everyone else's posts I am going to try my best to just add on to what others are saying and try not to repeat as much as possible, but still get my opinion across. As the first bloggers said there is not a concrete ending and for the first time I LOVED IT! Like some people have addressed I like to think although John is CRAZY beyond CRAZY, I still like to think of the small possibility of them ending up running away together! I know more than likely that is not what occurred but after all I am a girl who likes to dream. :)

I understood the connection between Vietnam and the strain it can cause on the craziness of soldiers such as John, but was mostly intrigued by the My Lai occurrence that was repeatedly drawn upon. With the descriptions of this massacre and the interview excerpts, I was able to better understand what went on during this time and how it effected different types of soldiers, like many bloggers before me suggested. I also felt those scenes helped me learn more about the mind sets of the soldiers prior to going into it. Although John was a little crazy before and after maybe it is because he does not truly know himself, he hides secrets from others and himself. I liked how Tim O'Brien took us through those scenes, although they were at times very hard to get through emotional because they created vivid pictures for me of them hurting young children without a due cause.

Also, many of us already commented on the way O'Brien wrote the novel and I personally LOVED that as well. Some posts prior to mine suggested the confusion the hypothesis and evidence chapters brought but I personally thought, like some others, that those chapters were the ones that drew us in more. O'Brien knew how to keep us going. We also gained insight from a lot of his excerpts placed in these chapters from other sources. And we could gain other views and insight from his own footnotes made about certain comments in those chapters.

I think I specifically liked the book and the ending because of the way Tim O'Brien drew himself into it. Especially towards the end, I felt like he gave us his opinion and asked rhetorical questions that made us form our own. As confusing the book may have been, and how beyond crazy John may have been, I have to say it was definitely a good read!