Succumbing to the Beast

“I feel close to myself. When I’m out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and I’m glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am. You can’t feel like that anywhere else.”

-The Things They Carried, p 106

Thanks to Mrs. Miles, I read this passage and could think of nothing but the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In Lord of the Flies, the band of schoolboys suffers a descent into animalistic savagery that is uncannily similar to the on Mary Anne experiences. These boys are so affected and terrified of an imagined Beast in the wild that they essentially become the Beast themselves. By succumbing and indulging in the exotic and wild, the boys become part of that same wild.

The same goes for Mary Anne. She becomes so immersed in the jungle of Vietnam that in the end, she becomes part of Vietnam. It is a bit frightening, really, to think that man (and woman) can be so altered by an encounter with a lack of civilization. It begs the question: are we the same way? If faced with a similar situation, would we become intoxicated by the wild? Would we become our own Beast? After reading about Mary Anne, it would be difficult to definitively say no.