What Does O Brien's Purpose Of How To Tell A War Story

O’Brien’s provides prose that arise doubt both in his work and other war novels by his metafiction within the novel. A reader could potentially read “How to Tell a War Story” and doubt the “credibility” of all war stories on the basis of how the story is presented. He does this by providing an additional perspective of the storyteller by providing realistic motives in the narration of stories that are often overlooked. O’Brien explicitly says this to the reader as:

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness. In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling (71).

As previously state, O’Brien persuades the reader to read his and other writer’s texts with skepticism. Rather than just be skeptical of the larger war scenes in the novel or nonfiction text, he asks the readers to question the validity of the text as a whole. By placing this onto the

As previous passages focus on this idea of emotion, inherent limits of storytelling, and questioning all war stories for its truth, O’Brien ultimately says, “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant” which means truth is not subjected to a nonfictional representation of an event. This concept breaks the boundary between fiction and nonfiction accounts of war as all stories are representations of an experience. However, this experience, according to O’Brien, also does not have to have occurred because it is what the story conveys that represents truth. It is through this convention that allows The Things They Carried to further expand the war story genre by defining truth within a story to include works of