A Lexico-Syntactic Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s "Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?"

Abstract

The Vietnam War was one of the major wars of the 20th century. It had a profound and multifaceted impact on society, politics, and culture. Moreover, many writers who served in the war used literature as a means of processing their traumas and conveying the raw emotions of combat. Therefore, this paper is mainly concerned with exploring the effect of the Vietnam War in Tim O'Brien's (1975) short story Where Have You Gone, charming Billy? by conducting a lexical syntactic analysis. Moreover, the sample is composed of one hundred ninety-seven words. To the best of the researcher's knowledge, there has not been lexical syntactic analysis on Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy? Accordingly, this article applies the approach of Short & Leech’s (2007) “Style in Fiction”, specifically, their checklist, which consists of four categories of analysis, lexical categories, cohesion, grammatical categories, and figures of speech. Furthermore, O’Brien’s chosen text is examined in terms of lexical and grammatical categories. The findings reveal that the author has used simple words more frequently in approximately 74% of the text, whereas complex words make up around 25%. As for sentence type and complexity, O'Brien uses simple declarative sentences much more frequently than the other types. Significantly, O'Brien depends on simplicity to deliver his message and shape the discourse around the Vietnam War.