It was the night of the Haunting - an event which occurred every 1000 years. Tonight, all mankind would take cover in their homes, while the angry spirits let out their rage which they had been holding in for the past millennia. Flames would burn, endlessly seeming, while the devils of the earth let out their fury. There would be bloodshed, war, and the pain of a million deaths.
Unfortunately, there were some people who didn’t believe all these tales, and took them for granted. The army, government, officers – their pride had let them to think they owned the world. Tonight, they wanted to prove to the rest of the world that their so-called tales were not true. Well, on they went; one pack of officers marched deep into the woods when the time
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He was never fond of Mark, but something about losing him now hurt him. Grief is a confusing thing. It hits you right when you don’t expect it. However, it was too late now and he had to accept the hard, unfortunate truth. Brian wiped his tears and put his head down.
“Why? What’s wrong with you? Who are you, anyways?” he cried out.
“I’m Tommy, or I was. Anyways, you need to calm down – you’re asking too many questions.”
“Well, answer them!” Brian snapped back. This probably aggravated the spirit, since its voice was suddenly raspy and filled with so much pain that you might have mistaken it for death himself.
“Imagine that one day you wake up, and all you see is pure black. Pure black, ten times deeper and more powerful than anything you could ever imagine. You try to move around, but you cannot see your own body or make any physical movements. You cannot see, taste, hear, or feel and the only working sense you possess is the ability to think. You cannot hurt yourself, and must remain in this current state for so long that eventually you simply give up on keeping track.” paused. “A millennium of time in which you cannot do anything – except think about what went wrong. I managed to escape that, Brian. After the Haunting was over, I stayed – unlike the others.” quietly breaking off at the
When telling a story details can be difficult to remember. Sometimes what happened can’t be pinpointed exactly. The lines between what is fact and fiction can easily become blurred. The short story “How to Tell a True War Story” tells of the difficulties of telling a true war story along with examples of true stories that are hard to believe. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” ("How to Tell a True War Story.”).
Tim O’Brien’s ultimate purpose is to detract the fine line between fiction and reality. In order to fully grasp what a true war story consists of, the definition of true must be deciphered. O’Brien seems to believe that it does not need to be pure facts. Instead, it is mostly found in the imagination of the individual. Readers need to receive a story based on the truth in its overall purpose and meaning. It just needs to feel true. The author implies that it is not important whether the event actually occurred or not, because if the reader wants to believe it that badly, the feeling of truth will always be present.
‘Perhaps that’s what the beast is—a ghost.’ The assembly was shaken as by a wind. ‘What d’you want me to say then? I was wrong to call this assembly so late. We’ll have to vote on them; on ghosts I mean; and then go to the shelters because we’re all tired.
But in truth a true war story will stir great feelings, but may not contain a moral at all. In fact, a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing th...
O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2009. 64-81. Print.
"The difference between fairy tales and war stories is that fairy tales begin with 'Once upon a time,' while war stories begin with 'Shit, I was there!'" (Lomperis 41). How does one tell a good war story? Is it important to be accurate to the events that took place? Does the reader need to trust the narrator? In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien examines what it takes to tell a good war story. He uses his own experiences in Vietnam in conjunction with his imagination to weave together a series of short stories into a novel.
Terror strikes Sighet, Transylvania and it suddenly becomes every man for himself. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish teenage boy is ripped from the life he knows and is put through misery by Hitler and the Nazis. During this time, family is everything to Elie. While struggling to survive, he is challenged mentally, physically, and spiritually. Wiesel uses imagery to express how he changes throughout his experiences in the camps. Wiesel uses the images of fire, corpses, and death to impact his views on life during the holocaust.
Why do people celebrate death? Many people including myself have wondered this, and when I first heard of the mexican holiday Dia De Los Muertos. Translated in english, day of the dead is a holiday where instead of mourning lost ones they remember their lost ones by making alters, decorating their graves with things they used to like or their favourite food and celebrate their life. This mexican tradition is now celebrated throughout the united states aswell and this year we decided to dedicate alters to people we lost in the battle against police brutality. We have lost so many souls in the past decade that a black lives matter movement was created. Its sad that it even had to get to this point but all we can do now is fight for change and
Telling war stories is something Americans do on a regular basis, sometimes all true and other times all untrue. War stories from Vietnam are far different than the war stories told about the European campaign in both World Wars because the enemy we fought was in a vastly different situation. These Vietnam war stories depict a time in American history where we failed as a military and as a nation. Tim O’Brien, author of “The Things They Carried”, a book full of Vietnam war stories that he claimed as ‘fictional’. However, by comparing O’Brien’s book with primary sources from “Thinking Through the Past” by John Hollitz and “A Place for Stories” by William Cronon, fictional war stories are equally important as factual war stories because emotions
The difficult association between the occurrence of war and storytelling is told through the eyes of Tim O’Brien; he explains that a true war story has a supreme adherence to offensiveness that provides a sense of pride and courage commonly found in storytelling. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and im...
In his short story, O’Brien unravels step by step the irony in the double meaning of truth, implied in this first statement, “This is true”, to the reader which is then woven through the entire story. By trying to characterize what constitutes a true war story, but never really achieving this goal, the true irony of his short story is revealed. Even though in some instances giving away his opinion explicitly, the sheer contradiction of honesty and reality becomes even more visible in an implicit way by following O’Brien’s explanations throughout the story while he deconstructs his first statement. The incongruity between his first statement and what is actually shown in his examples does not need any explicit statements to drive home his message.
Several stories into the novel, in the section, “How to tell a true war story”, O’Brien begins to warn readers of the lies and exaggerations that may occur when veterans tell war stories.
“It’s time to be blunt… I want you to feel what I felt” (O’Brien 171). There are two sides to every war and throughout the novel The Things They Carried, the author Tim O’Brien creates a war in the reader’s mind centered on trust. O’Brien forces the reader to realize the impact of a true war story where, instead of giving an accurate account, he blurs the lines about the importance of trust and gives an emotionally driven anecdote. The author establishes ethos in a unique way by impacting the credibility of a story rarely with facts and forcing the reader to focus on what is more important to him: evoking emotion. These emotions envelop the entirety of Tim O 'Brien 's short stories, showing his clear intentions to make the reader feel what
Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried challenges the reader to question what they are reading. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien claims that the story is true, and then continues to tell the story of Curt’s death and Rat Kiley’s struggle to cope with the loss of his best friend. As O’Brien is telling the story, he breaks up the story and adds in fragments about how the reader should challenge the validity of every war story. For example, O’Brien writes “you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (69), “in many cases a true war story cannot be believed” (71), “almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true” (81), and “a thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth (83). All of those examples are ways in which O’Brien hinted that his novel is a work of fiction, and even though the events never actually happened – their effects are much more meaningful. When O’Brien says that true war stories are never about war, he means that true war stories are about all the factors that contribute to the life of the soldiers like “love and memory” (85) rather than the actual war. Happening truth is the current time in which the story was being told, when O’Brien’s daughter asked him if he ever killed anyone, he answered no in happening truth because it has been 22 years since he was in war and he is a different person when his daughter asked him. Story truth
The child’s game had ended. After I nearly ran Kurtz over, we stood facing each other. He was unsteady on his feet, swaying like the trees that surrounded us. What stood before me was a ghost. Each layer of him had been carved away by the jungle, until nothing remained. Despite this, his strength still exceeded that of my own. With the tribal fires burning so close, one shout from him would unleash his natives on me. But in that same realization, I felt my own strength kindle inside me. I could just as easily muffle his command and overtake him. The scene flashed past my eyes as though I was remembering not imagining. The stick that lay two feet from me was beating down on the ghost, as my bloodied hand strangled his cries. My mind abruptly reeled backwards as I realized what unspeakable dark thoughts I had let in. Kurtz seemed to understand where my mind had wandered; it was as though the jungle’s wind has whispered my internal struggles to him. His face twisted into a smile. He seemed to gloat and enjoy standing by to watch my soul begin to destroy itself.