Case 2: people in crisis need to find alternative truths, either in a friend or in literature. Sometimes a person needs to make up their own truth to survive a crisis situation, so long as the person does not reject other philosophies as Grendel does. This is often the case in war, when a person must distance themselves from the violence, the cruelty, the sheer disgust of the fighting. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes that he tells war stories that are not “happening truth,” but rather a “story truth” that feels more genuine. In other words, often the depiction of a single, real event cannot convey everything that a person feels. According to O’Brien, a story can reveal much more by emphasizing or recreating everything that conveys the essence of the truth into a …show more content…
They share their truths and he his. Usually, this comes in the form of stories. His life is accepted by the others, and he accepts theirs, even stories “that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlum” (O’Brien 85) about girlfriends gone wild in Vietnam and sanity-depriving jungle music. There is no other choice in the war— communication is a natural form of coping. This is true of other situations of prolonged hardship— for example, the extended hostage situation in Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto caused the unlikely friendship between the hostages and terrorists that even caused love affairs between the two parties. Months of intimacy cause a friendship past tolerance, past intimacy: something more along the lines of clear, pure understanding. While the hostages and the terrorists have completely different roles, they become a homogenous group to survive. The terrorists and the hostages, like the soldiers, are saved by their ability to understand that everyone else shares their pain. It’s a different kind of group mentality than that of cliques, one that is forced and more
There are over thirty genres of books in the world. All of stories are told and written in many different forms from written to spoken, action to romance, or fiction to non-fiction. But, all stories have something in common--a theme that is intended to make a difference to the reader. No matter what the story is about, it is centered around a strong theme. The author of The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien., uses a separate theme in each of his vignettes. But, these themes aren't always depicted through truth. "I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now , and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented"(171). O'Brien uses story-truth and happening-truth in The Things They Carried to show a great theme. In certain cases in the book, story-truth shows theme better and happening-truth isn't used and vice versa. In the vignette "The
Tim O’Brien is a very gifted author, but he is also a veteran of the Vietnam War and fought with the United States in that controversial war. Tim O’Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War in 1968. He served as an infantryman, and obtained the rank of sergeant and won a Purple Heart after being wounded by shrapnel. He was discharged from the Vietnam War in 1970. I believe that O’Brien’s own images and past experiences he encountered in the Vietnam War gave him inspiration to write the story “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien tells the story in third person narrative form about Lt. Jimmy Cross and his platoon of young American men in the Vietnam War. In “The Things They Carried” we can see differences and similarities between the characters by the things they hold close to them.
...r because it seems impossible to reconstruct an event from this objective point of view. Maybe the point of telling stories is not trying to recreate the reality of a past event, but it is the message that matters because that might be in the end the only thing that does not necessarily depend on single details of the story, but on the overall picture of an event. That is why to O’Brien another important component of a war story is the fact that a war story will never pin down the definite truth and that is why a true war story “never seems to end” (O’Brien, 425). O’Brien moves the reader from the short and simple statement “This is the truth” to the conclusion that, “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 nohting much is ever very true” (O’Brien, 428). These two statements frame the entire irony of the story, from its beginning to its end. Almost like the popular saying “A wise man admits that he knows nothing.”
In the book “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien uses imagery, figurative language and repetition to convey his message. O’Brien’s purpose for story telling, is to clear his conscience of war and to tell the stories of soldiers who were forgotten by society. Many young men were sent to war, despite opposing it. They believed it was “wrong” to be sent to their deaths. Sadly, no one realizes a person’s significance until they die. Only remembering how they lived rather than acknowledging their existence when they were alive.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a very uniquely written book. This book is comprised of countless stories that, though are out of order, intertwine and capture the reader’s attention through the end of the novel. This book, which is more a collection of short stories rather than one story that has a beginning and an end, uses a format that will keep the reader coming back for more.
The truth to any war does not lie in the depths of storytelling but rather it’s embedded in every person involved. According to O’Brien, “A true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (pg. 80). Truths of any war story in my own opinion cannot be fully conveyed or explained through the use of words. Any and all war stories provide specific or certain facts about war but each of them do not and cannot allow the audience to fully grasp the tru...
O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried layering themes on top of themes, but what makes it amazing is the way he presents these themes. Every single one intertwined with another. Burdens. Truth. Death. The soldiers carried their burdens and the death of their friends and enemies, and they live on as storytellers telling their war stories, but can there really be a true war story?
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
Everyone encounters some type of battle or challenge in their lives. Some have to deal with something like passing a class, some with the stress of not knowing when their next meal will be. Some have to cope with the after-effects of the war. All war veterans have to bear the mental weight of the events that occurred while at war, feelings of fear and guilt, and sometimes the thoughts don’t seem to go away. We see this looking through the psychological lens in the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
War is infamous for its ability to turn boys into men by forcing adolescents to let go of their innocence in order for them and their brothers in arms to survive. The famous work “The Things They Carried” written by Tim O’Brien in 1990, is a story that attempts to recreate an early life of soldier known as Jimmy Cross. The young adult loses his innocence during the Vietnam War due to the hardships foisted upon him by combat, friends, and love. From opening lines to the final paragraph, Jimmy Cross encounters many hardships that help shape the destruction of his innocence as well as transforming him from a child in combat to a hardened soldier.
In the literary world, there’s an abundance of books and stories that are about war. They each are unique in how it’s told or by whom. In the case of “The Things They Carried” it’s understood that the author is the narrator a majority of the time. In the novel, a reoccurring theme is truth or rather the truth in storytelling. So Tim really makes you think, or even rethink, how you felt about all of his stories and other war stories you’ve read or seen in the past. How did you feel and should you really feel? I question all of it now, and that just gets under my skin. So are Tim’s stories true, or aren’t they? Why would O’Brien focus so much on the truth; what’s the point anyways?
Some authors choose to write stories and novels specifically to evoke certain emotions from their readers as opposed to writing it for just a visual presentation. In order to do this, they occasionally stretch the truth and “distort” the event that actually occurred. The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, is a compilation of short stories about the Vietnam War with distortion being a key element in each of them.
In times of war, many men and women tend to forget or alter their memories. Thoughts became mixed up, the sense of time becomes delayed, and the telling of one man’s experience does not seem possibly true. In The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien writes about realistic events that never truly happened to him while he was at war. Nevertheless, he goes on telling about in writing a war story, a person can never remember the full event or will change it in a way that is not true. War will bring the worst out in people, and often, many of the men and women who live through it, cannot tell the full tale.
The soldiers feel that the only people they can talk to about the war are their “brothers”, the other men who experienced the Vietnam War. The friendship and kinship that grew in the jungles of Vietnam survived and lived on here in the United States. By talking to each other, the soldiers help to sort out the incidents that happened in the War and to put these incidents behind them. “The thing to do, we decided, was to forget the coffee and switch to gin, which improved the mood, and not much later we were laughing at some of the craziness that used to go on” (O’Brien, 29).
Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, expresses his journey throughout the Vietnam War via a series of short stories. The novel uses storytelling to express the emotional toll the men encountered, as well as elucidate their intense experiences faced during the war. The literary theory, postmodernism, looks at these war experiences and questions their subjectivity, objectivity, and truth in a literary setting. It allows the reader to look through a lens that deepens the meaning of a work by looking past what is written and discovering the various truths. O’Brien used the storytelling process to illustrate the bleeding frame of truth. Through his unique writing style, he articulates the central idea of postmodernism to demonstrate the