In the book How To Read Literature Like a Professor, the author interprets communion in an unlikely manner. He states, “…whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.”(Foster 8). That means even if you’re eating as a family or with a group of people, you’re all taking place in communion. One generally thinks communion is a practice that takes place only in churches. In the book The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes about communion as Foster defines. In one instance, they were sitting around in the hot sun and they were all taking salt tabs just to stay alive (O'Brien 185). O'Brien also says, "Late in the afternoon, just before dusk, Kiowa came up and asked if he could sit at my foxhole for a minute. He offered me a Christmas cookie …show more content…
Foster says, in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, “So what’s geography? Rivers, hills, valleys, buttes, steppes, glaciers, swamps, mountains, prairies, chasms, seas, islands, people.” (Foster 165). In O’Brien’s book, there are a lot of landforms throughout the story. The geography in the story helps the reader understand the hardships of being in the army. It helps them understand what's going on, and it also opens the reader's mind so they can experience what the writer was experiencing while being out there in the war. One night there was a never ending downpour. The men were in the middle of warring too. O’Brien said,” The field was boiling.” (O’Brien142). The field was under heavy fire with mortars and that was creating big craters in the field. Those craters eventually turned into sinkholes (O’Brien 142)(O’Brien 162). Then eighteen men were crossing an overflowing river, wading through the murky waters. The river was knee-deep with thick slosh (O'Brien 156). With the descriptions, you can image what that looked like. Years later, O’Brien took his daughter, Kathleen, out to Vietnam where the war took place. He says,” Now looking out at the field, I wondered if it was all a mistake. Everything was too ordinary.” (O’Brien 176). With that being said, the field must have looked completely different compared to twenty plus years ago when it was a battlefield. He also said,” Now, it was just what it was. Flat and dreary, and unremarkable.” (O’Brien 176). If stories didn’t have good settings, like the land around them, and where they are, us readers would have a hard time figuring out was is going on with the characters. The setting has a lot to do with a story, it adds more emotion to what is taking place. The description of the landscapes significantly helps the reader understand what is going on with the characters. When on a vacation, and someone asks where you are, you have to give them little descriptions of where you are so they can get a