Communication In It's Different Forms

Communication, in its many forms, plays an essential role in Tim O’Brien’s ‘How to Tell a True War Story’, Elizabeth Berg’s ‘Range of Motion’ and William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

O’Brien uses his words to communicate an experience of six soldiers in the mountains. Without this story that symbolized the various ways these men were affected, us as readers would not be able to comprehend the severity of their war experience and how it permanently impacted them. The communication and contact through words between we, the readers, and the soldiers in this tale is precisely what allows for an understanding between us both. The soldiers hallucinate that “Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country, Vietnam. The place talks” and instead of dismissing these illusions as absurdity or insanity, their experience written down, communicated to us through O’Brien’s characters and actions, allows us readers to see it with fresh eyes, hear it with new ears, taste it with hungry mouths, and feel it with understanding hearts. Communication is used as a tool through story writing. It illuminates this specific stories’ purpose which pleads with us readers to understand that we won’t understand, that there won’t be an “ah ha, I get it!” moment but instead that we will feel appreciation, empathy, and compassion for the openness and ambiguity in our own lives and the lives of others.

In Elizabeth Berg’s ‘Range of Motion’ the main character, Lainey Berman, struggles with her husband Jay’s tragic accident that has left him in a coma. This loss of communication and connection between husband and wife leads to Lainey’s struggle as a wife and as a mother of their two daughters. Unlike with O’Brien, when words themselves were the key communication that portrayed his meaning, Berg’s characters are face to face with a relentless silence, a hopeless hush. Communication takes on a different form in this novel. “How we speak when we don’t speak” Lainey thought to herself, as she hemmed the button to one of her husband’s shirts. “I’ll hem them by hand, thinking healing thoughts with each stitch.” Here, this character takes communication and translates her message of love through her hands, allowing they themselves to take on the delicate form of her “healing” thoughts. While in the hospital, Lainey also becomes observant of the other day to day visitors, of the many nurses and doctors and the relationships they share through their actions she’s studied. Here, again, Elizabeth Berg brilliantly and consistently reveals communication in its other form. Lainey watched “as the nurse carried his coffee in to him as though it was her heart on a silver platter, which of course, it is” and witnessed a love story of it’s own unraveling right there in front of her. Instead of Elizabeth Berg coming right out and saying that there was a love affair going on between two workers, she sticks to her pattern of communication through the body and hands and hearts and cups of coffee and silver platters and other physical objects. This book held many purposes, but one important one being that this type of communication, which happens through our actions and the sincerity behind our thoughts when we do act, has just as much a voice as words do.

Shakespeare’s tragic tale of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a frustrating experience of a “miscommunication”. It’s set up, which includes the son of Montague and the daughter of Capulet falling in love foreshadows this play’s inevitable heartbreaking ending. When the two go on to get married in secret by Friar Lawrence, this secrecy and covert communication through only these three characters is symbolic of their unaccepted love. The battle outbreak between Mercutio and Tybalt leads to Mercutio’s death, despite Romeo’s useless attempt to talk to and communicate with him first. When Romeo ends up murdering Tybalt, his wife’s kinsman, this implies the failed efforts Romeo had at all to compromise with the Capulet’s is officially vanished. As Shakespeare sets up these disastrous events to continue like a domino effect, Juliet and Friar Lawrence’s idea to drink “fake” poison so her and Romeo can live together in Mantua fails and it’s foreseeable what comes next. Friar’s letter to Romeo explaining the plan never reaches him and of course he only hears of his wife’s death. THIS one task, THIS one message of communication is the most significant and imperative moment that could have altered the outcome of these two lovers. As Romeo poisons himself next to Juliet’s tomb and she eventually finds him and realizes what’s happened, her own attempts to poison herself by kissing him fails but she goes on to bury his dagger in her heart, falling dead, too, over Romeo's body. Here lies tragedy in its truest form. Shakespeare brutally proves to us how devastating a “miscommunication” can be and how it can cause eternal ruin in the hearts of its victim’s and the one’s left behind to witness it, like Romeo and Juliet's distressed mothers Lady Montague and Lady Capulet. This play is a major contrast to both Tim O’Brien and Elizabeth Berg’s literature works. The other two novels enlighten the positive wonders and powers of communication both through words and story itself and when it’s formed through actions and objects. With Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare touched upon the fears and tragedies that transpire if or when miscommunication occurs, this is of course portraying how important communicating is, but instead Shakespeare does it indirectly by focusing on the dark end of it instead of the light and this is where his work differs from the others.