Scattered mind from War

O'Brien suggests that war is less violent and more sweet. He seems to share a lot of his disconnecting memories of the war in "Spin”. Every night, Henry Dobbins and Norman Bowker dig a foxhole and play checkers. Mitchell Sanders picks his lice off of his body and puts them in an envelope to his Ohio draft board. O'Brien finally stops his anecdotes when he says that he is now a forty-three year old writer and that the bad memories live on and never stop occurring.

The use of the unconnected anecdotes in scattered phrases and half-realized memories stylistically shows the fragmentation of the war experience. The anecdotes seem really unrelated and jump in time and purpose. This relates to the way a soldier’s mind might jump around in his past. In this story, it becomes clear to us that all the stories O’Brien is telling originate from his memory. A shift in tone comes with the fragmentation; O’Brien transitions from a balanced to a disillusioned evaluation of the war. O'Brien believes that the war is unlike Dobbins and Bowker’s well-ordered, rational games of checkers. The war has neither rules nor winners, and men witness horrific acts and random acts of kindness.