Three - Spin

First off, the brief paragraph about Mitchell Sanders sending his body lice to his draft board literally made me laugh out loud. Also, I found it intriguing that he placed a mildly amusing story immediately after a mildly sad story about a one-legged child (although he at least got chocolate in the end). It looks almost like a juxtaposition of paragraphs, if that's even allowed.

Anyway, to me, the most important part of this chapter was O'Brien's simile: "On occasions, the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance" (p. 31). In several ways, this chapter seems to be set up like a ping-pong match, in which every return hit seems to put a different angle of spin on the ball. Each new spin carries with it a new emotion which is brought out in a different story. Each new story (or "spin," if you will) brings on a different angle of the war and its effect on Tim. ping A sad story about a one-legged child, pong a funny story about Sanders and his lice, ping a calming story about checkers, pong a reminiscent story about O'Brien after the war, ping a mellow story about Lavender all doped up, pong a bittersweet story about poppa-san, ping a boring story about nothing, pong a guilty story about writing, ping a peace story about a man and a nurse, pong an amusing story about a raindance and the patient buffalo, ping a sickening story about a puppy, pong a sad story about a boy playing soldier. The whole chapter is really just a series of stories that all serve to show that the war wasn't all just bloody and gory depressing war stories, nor was it fantastic stories of glorious triumph. In the end, to use one of my most favorite phrases, it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. And that's how most things are.

These are two cats playing Ping-Pong. One can only
assume that they are quite skilled in the art of spin