Tim OBriens Zeugmatic Novel, The Things They Carried :: Things They Carried Essays

Tim O'Brien's Zeugmatic Novel, The Things They Carried An early example of zeugma comes from Quintilian, the ancient Roman rhetorician, who cites the following from Cicero: "Lust conquered shame, boldness fear, madness reason," where the verb "conquered" is understood to also govern the final two phrases in the sentence (Crowley 203). The 18th century, an age of great rhetorical knowledge on the part of writers and preachers (and at least one writer-preacher, Laurence Sterne), is the heyday of zeugma. In "The Rape of the Lock" Alexander Pope speculates what may happen to Bellinda on a particularly ominous day: Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law, Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade, Forget her Pray'rs, or miss a Masquerade, Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball.... (Butt 225) Pope does a beautiful job of contrasting the serious and the superficial in these five lines-will her chastity or her jar become flawed, will she forget her prayers or the masquerade? My paraphrases here fill out an implied zeugma in these lines, but it is in the third and fifth lines where he actually employs zeugma: will she "stain her Honour, or her new Brocade"? Will she "lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a ball"? In these "stain" and "lose" branch out to include (or to be more etymologically correct) YOKE quite different things: lace and a necklace being a bit more easily replaced than a stained honor and a lost heart, as those of you who have been in love may perhaps attest to. Richard Lanham, in a Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, defines zeugma as follows and again cites an example in Pope: "One verb governs several congruent words or clauses, each in a different way, as in 'The Rape of the Lock': Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey Dost sometimes counsel take-and sometimes tea." (Lanham 104-5)