The setting in Field Trip from The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien creates and exposes the different point of views carried by each character. It shows how a setting of sentimental value and past, in this case a battlefield, can be interpreted and misunderstood by characters not similar in background.
Although closely related, as father and daughter, two of the main characters in Field Trip still interpret the setting very differently. Returning to the site where his close friend and fellow solider fell 20 years earlier, Tim, who is also the narrator, understands the field much better than his daughter, Kathleen. “I stood with my arms folded, feeling the grip of sentiment and time. Amazing, I thought. Twenty Years” (p.182). As Tim was remembering the past and honoring his old friend his daughter was sitting in the jeep with the interpreter, talking softly and quickly becoming friends. Neither of them seemed to grasp the significance of the place or the reason why they traveled on bumpy dirt roads for two hours in the blazing sun. They had not experienced what Tim had experienced. War changes someone and in this case makes relating to a ten-year-old girl very difficult.
This passage shows how Kathleen does not understand what is going through her father's head as he is looking out at the field. “I took out my camera, snapped a couple of pictures, then stood gazing out at the field. After a time Kathleen got out of the jeep and stood beside me. "You know what I think?" she said. "I think this place stinks. It smells like…God, I don"t even know what. It smells rotten” (p.182). This sounds pretty thoughtless at first, saying how this place smells as her dad is remembering fighting on the same grounds and watching his friends fall, but then you realize that she really just does not know any better. There is no way a ten-year-old girl can realize the intensity of battle and relate to how her father is feeling.
Something is revealed about the narrator's character when you learn that this trip was kind of a birthday gift to Kathleen. It makes the reader think that maybe Tim wanted to try to connect with his daughter better, or show her why he feels the way he does by bringing her to Vietnam. Does he realize that she cannot relate and does he realize that he may be expecting more out of her than he should be?
When she asked him why he had to go to this place during the war he answered, “I don't know, because I had to be” (p.183). She did not accept that answer, wanted to know why he had to come back, and kept asking why, only to get the same answer. Tim really could not find a reason. It was just something he knew he had to do. It felt right and he had business there, a final laying to rest. She could still not understand this.
He thought it was appropriate to bring his 10-year-old daughter to a battle scene to see where his best friend had died. This was probably because he was attempting to connect with her and help her understand why he felt the way he did. In an interview of O'Brien a few years after he published The Things They Carried he explains how he attempted to make non-veteran readers understand the feelings of veteran readers by asking certain questions, such as “How would you feel if this happened to you,” and “How would you feel if suddenly you were drafted”( Literary Events Featuring O'Brien). This is just his attempt at getting readers to think through to the other side and realize what some people went through. Asking questions like these was for the same reason he brought his daughter to Vietnam. Aside from his personal tasks he wanted to educate his daughter on something that was very important to him; something that he felt his daughter should understand just like his readers. “Indeed, much of O'Brien's fiction seems to be concerned with probing the limits of trauma and attempting to find ways of overcoming the division between those who experienced the war in Vietnam and those who did not” (Acts of cultural identification.) Many people believed getting un-traumatized readers, meaning ones who did not go to war, to share the same feelings as traumatized readers was impossible.
Christopher Mc-Donough writes in Incense and Ashes that Tim O'Brien's stories are of a postmodern theme, meaning he writes from experience and therefore people who have not experienced can never fully understand. This view opposes O'Brien's by saying that getting his daughter to fully understand the past is impossible because she did not experience the thing being taught.
By the end of Field Trip, it is apparent that his daughter still does not understand everything that her father went through. As much as he wants his daughter to understand how he feels, the theme of post modernism proves that that is not possible. She was not there therefore she can only experience what she has been told, which is not the full experience.
