Notes

"the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them"

-"Cause and Effect", Charles Bukowski

This chapter is interesting because it reveals a lot about the narrator, and possibly the author, and about the character Norman Bowker. Much about Bowker's postwar life can be compared to O'Brien's trouble writing about it in his literature. Bowker's life wavered after the war and so did O'Brien's feelings about how he tried to explain it in his novel Going After Cacciato and eventually O'Brien cuts the chapter from that novel just as Bowker cuts his own life out of the picture. It's tragic that he never got to read this book. 

Notes also gives insight to the lives of both O'Brien and Bowker and their transitions from wartime to peacetime. Bowker obviously chose to lose touch with normal life that ends with his demise but O'Brien, however, gets along just fine and goes to graduate school at Harvard. I personally would find that hard to do after experiencing so much like Vietnam.