the things that go bump in the night - TTTC

"Out beyond the wire, the paddies would seem to swirl and sway; the trees would take human form; clumps of grass would glide through the night like sappers."

(p. 199)

here, in the middle of the night, we see a number of things personified. the paddies swirl and sway. the trees take human form (can it get more obvious?). the grass would glide. of course, none of this is really meant to be poetic right here. it's more that it's nighttime, and everything is scarier at night. trees become beings. and everything moves on its own accord. this hypersensitivity is heightened, too, by the fact that O'Brien (with the help of Azar) is exacting his revenge on Jorgenson at this point. even while he's trying to scare Jorgenson, he's being scared himself by the sheer nature of things. how's that for irony? but all of this (which has been previously forshadowed [hah!]) is overcome by the hypersensitivity and personification of everything around.

gangrene is not a weird shade of green - TTTC

"After the rot cleared up, once I could think straight, I devoted a lot of time to figuring ways to get back at him."

(p. 181)

so even in war, there's revenge. or something like it. this little piece is sort of a cliff hanger. I mean, there's a break in the story here, and it doesn't continue forward with the story directly afterward. it gives a little side-note about what you can learn from being shot. but this excerpt seems to be a foreshadowing of something to come. as I continued to read this chapter, it became more and more clear to me that O'Brien was going to do SOMETHING to get Jorgenson back. I was never sure what he was going to do exactly. that's not the point. the main idea here is that something would be done. a lot of devoted time can't go unwasted, I guess. you don't almost let someone die of shock in a war and expect not to get something nasty in return? is that really the lesson here?