Comparing Boys And The Things They Carried
The pieces I chose are “Boys” by Rich Moody and “The Things they Carried” by Tim O'Brien. “Boys” doesn't use any paragraphs, and is told through the repeated words “Boys enter the house…” (Moody). The piece true there story of two twin boys who grow up as normal, mischievous boys. As they grow up, they go through hardships and drift apart. It isn't until they exit the house after the paramedics take their father’s body or are they “no longer boys” (Moody). “The Things they Carried” features the story of an American platoon during the Vietnam War. The story is took off out of chronological order as the reader is told of one of the soldiers death in the second paragraph. It isn't until the middle of the story that it is revealed exactly
how he died. Through the things they carried, the reader is exposed to the character’s personalities, fears, and guilt. We see how First Lieutenant Cross tries to hold onto things from Home, only to realize that by holding onto them, he puts his men at risk
As far as rules I would like to break in my own writing, I am unsure what those might be. I have always been a little apprehensive about postmodern work because I often have to read them more than once to understand them. The fact is, I find the breaking of the rules distracting while I am reading the piece. As such, I have never thought about using similar techniques within my own work, though I believe it might be interesting to see what I can accomplish using such techniques. Of all the rules that could be broken, I think the two most intriguing to me is to tell a story out of chronological order and using more than one characters point of view.
With these two techniques, I think it would be possible to tell very interesting stories. I am adverse to breaking the rules of punctuation such as in the work of Cormac McCarthy, which I struggled to get through in another course. Breaking the rules of chronological order can allow the reader to get a different vantage point of a story as works are usually pretty straight forward. Using the point of view of more than one character also allows for a deeper understanding of the story as you can show something affects more than one person either from the same event or show people who have nothing else in common going through the same sort of event in their lives.
how he died. Through the things they carried, the reader is exposed to the character’s personalities, fears, and guilt. We see how First Lieutenant Cross tries to hold onto things from Home, only to realize that by holding onto them, he puts his men at risk
As far as rules I would like to break in my own writing, I am unsure what those might be. I have always been a little apprehensive about postmodern work because I often have to read them more than once to understand them. The fact is, I find the breaking of the rules distracting while I am reading the piece. As such, I have never thought about using similar techniques within my own work, though I believe it might be interesting to see what I can accomplish using such techniques. Of all the rules that could be broken, I think the two most intriguing to me is to tell a story out of chronological order and using more than one characters point of view.
With these two techniques, I think it would be possible to tell very interesting stories. I am adverse to breaking the rules of punctuation such as in the work of Cormac McCarthy, which I struggled to get through in another course. Breaking the rules of chronological order can allow the reader to get a different vantage point of a story as works are usually pretty straight forward. Using the point of view of more than one character also allows for a deeper understanding of the story as you can show something affects more than one person either from the same event or show people who have nothing else in common going through the same sort of event in their lives.