The story is told by an omniscient narrator focusing mainly on the character First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Lieutenant Cross is in charge of a company of men who go on daily marches through Vietnam in search for the enemy, their sympathizers and supplies. He often daydreams of a college girl he is fond of back in New Jersey. Mitchell Sanders is the radio and telephone operator and known for being the ladies’ man. Kiowa is a Native American Baptist who carries an Illustrated New Testament with him. He also carries his grandfather’s old hunting hatchet given to him by his father and his grandmother’s distrust for the white man. Dan Jensen practices field hygiene by having with him a toothbrush, dental floss and bars of soap stolen from a hotel while on R&R. Henry Dobbins is a large man who carried extra rations and was excused from searching tunnels due to the size of his frame. He carries the M60, is especially fond of canned peaches, and wears his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck as god luck. Rat Kiley is the medic, carrying a canvas satchel containing morphine, plasma, malaria pills and various medical supplies and comic books. Norman Bowker is a gentle guy, he keeps a diary with him and carries a thumb from a VC corpse that Mitchell Sanders had cut off and presented to him. Lee Strunk has a…
True war is exclusive, true war is not read from or watched, true war is only told by those who have faced it dead in the eye. Although experiences like these will never be truly known to the outside world, Tim O’Brien uses juxtaposition, allowing his readers to undergo the next best thing. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien explains his take on what a real war story should look like. In it he uses juxtaposition to emphasize points and reveal the emotions of characters. An example of juxtaposition comes when the platoon encounters a water buffalo in the mountains.…
This novel is very different from the others that I have read. Tim O’Brien wrote this book to show how it was at Vietnam and what soldiers have to go thru. However he wrote this book under the genre of fiction because this way he could write things that were not true and still make it billable to the reader. Rather than him just saying things as they are. Perhaps if he told things as they really happen then the reader might not be interested of what was going on. Now the author wrote this book for two reasons.…
In the short story, “How to Tell a True War Story,” the implicit problem that is created about the story by its first line, “this is true,” is that the readers may think the line is sarcasm and not believe the information being said. The readers will question if the story is true or not. Throughout the story the narrator says how many war stories are not true so I do not know what to believe. The author, Tim O’Brien, says that nothing can be believed to be true, which makes the story ironic. He says, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing much is ever very true” (95). I would think that this story is not true after that being said.…
Tim O’ Brien’s “How to tell a true war story” construes the relationship between the war experiences and the ways of storytelling. O Brien’s story telling as a narrator shows that the storyteller has the power to form his listener’s experiences and opinions. His way of describing situations are unique because his story distorted the reader’s perceptions of beauty and ugliness by making different situation and scenes seem pleasing, even though it contains improbability…
O'Brien, on pages 80 and 8, talks about how people don't understand the full meaning of the truth behind a war story. There are so many things that go into a war that people and readers don’t understand,which is why he tries to explain why the “truth” and analyzing the meaning is so important. All of the things O’Brien describes in his stories aren't “true” per say because those are not what the story is about. In the end he tries to convey the fact that all are about prejudice. The stories are in fact about cheery subjects like: love, memory, happiness, old times, and no reader will ever understand because they themselves misunderstand. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” Rat Kiley goes on about the story of Mary Ann. Rat Kiley warns his…
Throughout the the novel the reader follows Tim O’Brien during his tour in the Vietnam War and are exposed to a variety of stories that with varying degrees of truth. While these stories are told with a variety of truth they tell the reader that while a story can be simply a retelling of a specific event, for O’Brien the retelling of these stories helps him cope with what he did in the Vietnam War. These stories can…
Tim O’Brien writes, “there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” (71) Exaggeration brings feeling to a war story. The reader not only listens, the reader feels and understands the feeling the writer is giving off. A war story should make the reader feel what is read, not think what is read. Tim O’Brien says “It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.”(71) For a war story to be a true war story, the reader should be able to feel the story inside of them. The reader should react as if the experience the writer went through happened to…
I am sitting by the fireplace and just thinking about life in general when memories from elementary school come flooding back. I am writing this letter to you, because I feel very guilty when thoughts of your son cross my mind. To this day I wish I knew better and stood up for your son when I needed to, because I could have saved an innocent life. Not trying to make excuses, but when I was in elementary school I knew nothing better, except the fact that, you go with the flow or else you become an outcast. I could still clearly remember the first day Matthew started going to my elementary school, and just because he looked different all of us decided he did not belong. He would come to the kids and ask them in such a nice and polite way if they wanted to play with him, and in response kids would say something nasty, no elementary kid should ever say. I remember boys throwing rocks at him during recess, and a bunch of girls standing by and laughing. Yes, I also did stand by and watched, but I never encouraged the boys on or laughed, because I was thought better by my parents. My parents tell me all the time no matter how the person you come in contact with acts, you show your best side to them, because at the end of the day were all the same and no one person is better than another. One day in particular, I remember Matthew needed to go to the bathroom during recess, and the immature boys decided to take advantage of this situation. They ran to the bathroom, and blocked him from going in. He begged so much, I can still hear his voice so clearly in my head to let him go. Not being able to hold it in any longer he did it his pants, and the situation became even worse. There…
Many authors have written war stories and about the effects of war on a person. Two of these writers are Tim O'Brian and Ernest Hemingway. O'Brian wrote "How to Tell a True War Story"; and Hemingway wrote a short story called "Soldier's Home". Both of these stories illustrate to the reader just what war can do to an average person and what, during war, made the person change. The stories are alike in many respects due to the fact that both authors served time in the army; O'Brian in the Vietnam War and Hemingway in WWI. However, the stories do have differences due to the slightly different themes and also the different writing techniques of the authors.…
It showed me how people may have a manipulated thought about how tragic war is because of the inability we have as humans to believe such tragedy is possible. It made me wonder if people who were in the war don’t only tell stories from their experience not because it’s painful for them but because they worry about people not believing them. O’Brien made a very good point in saying that in some way for people that lived through a tragic situation they can only tell what seemed to happen, and how in some way telling these stories is…
Have you ever been through a traumatic experience? How did you explain your feelings during it? Did you want the other person to feel the same way you did? A few years ago, a drunk driver ran a red light and crashed into my vehicle. Surviving the accident with no marks, bruises, or scrapes, I had no visible proof of what I had been through. But mentally, I was hysterical, frantic, and upset. My family did not understand my reason for being distraught since I had not sustained any injuries. Wanting them to understand what I had gone through and how I felt, I exaggerated and gave extra details in an attempt to prove that my experience was detrimental and distressing. Tim O’Brien, the author of the short story How to Tell a True War Story, used symbolism and polysyndeton to convey that people often exaggerate after experiencing something profound, emotional, or traumatic in order to communicate unthinkable sensations and feelings.…
O’Brien tells his story when he was in the Vietnam War though books that he has written. For example in “The Things They Carried” there is a character named Tim. One of the interviews from Library of Congress Tim O’Brien states that “he goes back and forth about Vietnam and also about his first girlfriend.” He was in 4th grade when he was in love and that using his girlfriend as an example that Vietnam was not that easy like losing his girlfriend at nine years old. In the story Bob Kiley was known as Rat. O’ Brien points out that Rat that had a good friend with him in the Vietnam War. They both were good soldiers and when Lemon would volunteer Rat would volunteer as well. He lets people know that his friend and he were goofing around like always. Lemon showed Rat that the war can be fun but also very serious. There will be times to goof around and there will be times to be services during the war. He tells people that when they were goofing around they felt like kids again. Lemon and Rat “were giggling and calling each other motherfucker”. They would go a nature hike in the woods and started messing around. They heard a noise and next thing a bomb killed his friend. Rat had taken his friend back with the other soldiers. Hs friend named was Curt Lemon. He told Sander and the other soldiers what happen to Lemon.…
In chapter 7, O’Brien is telling the readers how to tell a true war story. He says it should be “difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (44) if it is a true war story, and they “cannot be believed” (44). He points out, before he tells any stories, that every story should not be completely believed, and if it is then the believer should be skeptical to if it is real. Majority of the stories told in the novel are either made up or extremely exaggerated. When he talks about Kiowa and Bowker he says “you start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (101), he clearly explains that the stories are added on to get the point across. He uses fake characters and fake stories to tell every reader what really happened to him in war. O’Brien uses metafiction in the whole novel to give the readers an imaginable mental picture that would take them to the exact experience the character had to…
Another interesting, yet powerful way O’Brien shows the non-reality of war’s truths is the fact that a combat situation can reveal who someone is, right down to their core. For example, Dave Jensen is a…