Repetition

O’Brien uses a lot of repetition in this book. He mentions Jimmy Cross’s love for Martha many times. How he longs to be with her and to have her love him. Every time Cross mentions his love for her, he also mentions that she was a poet, an English major, a virgin (he believed), and a very quiet girl who kept to herself.
The repetition of the Cross-Martha relationship made me think of how hard it must be to be a soldier in war, as in a different world. Yes, he had a very close bond with the soldiers, but there is a longing for a different kind of relationship. He wants so bad for the letters to just be love letters; For Martha to love him back. Although they have a deep friendship, he wants more from that relationship. It makes you feel sad for Cross; all he wants is to be loved.
On page 17 it says “she belonged to another world, which was not quite real”. I felt like Cross, being a soldier at war, feels a real struggle to want to be in Martha’s world, to be in that dream world where you don’t have to worry about you or your friends being killed. He just wants to be in love, walk on the beach, and enjoy life. But those are just dreams, imaginations, not quite real.
I also like how O’Brien depicts Martha’s reactions to Cross. She would give him a sad, sober look with gray neutral eyes and he used the word “uninvolved” when describing her. I feel that Martha had a totally separate struggle from Cross’s. To me, I think that Martha may have been sexually abused. On page 28 and 29 Cross is telling the story of when he met up with Martha later. Her mannerisms show that she wasn’t comfortable showing love. There was no pressure in return when he held her hand. She avoided the subject of love. He describes a moment when she closed her eyes, crossed her arms, and rocked slightly, as if she was trying not to remember something emotionally painful. And then she says to Cross “I don’t understand how men could do those things”. Even though Martha never describes what she meant by those words, you can feel her sadness and her vulnerability at that moment. I feel like she kept writing Cross and sending him pictures because she wanted to have a relationship with a man that she was able to trust. Someone that wasn’t like the rest of the men she knew. I believe that is why she kept their relationship as a friendship. She didn’t want a physical relationship, but a relationship built on trust. She wanted someone to understand her as a person, her hobbies, her interests, her love for poetry and helping others.
O’Brien never really tells the whole story. He adds bits and pieces to his book and they seem to form together to make a story. The repetition of images and events are ways of letting us readers see what he saw, what he felt was important to him during the war and how he felt about those different circumstances without writing it all down word for word.