Nietzsche and O’Brien have some ideas that are very similar, and some that are opposite. O’Brien thinks that to tell a true war story the story has to unbelievable, but Nietzsche thinks people make unreal appear real. On the other hand, both Nietzsche and O’Brien agree that people exchange the truths for illusions, which O’Brien refers to as magic; and people use intellect to deceive others.
Nietzsche believes that the way intellect works is to deceive people. They naturally play that role in order to keep a secret or to restrict sharing information with another person. In other words he means people lie in order to not share the agreed upon lie. He says, “…individuals so far wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he will under
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He implies, “The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real” (Truth and lies, 54). However, this is not the case with O’Brien’s writings. O’Brien mentions that a true war story is in a way that it completely sounds unrealistic, which is one detail that completely conflicts Nietzsche’s thoughts. In his story the “How to tell a true war story”, he says, “A true war story is never moral… embarrassing… unbelievable… contradictory…” (A true war story) According to Nietzsche, O’Brien is telling all lies because his stories appear unreal, and unbelievable. Nevertheless, according to O’Brien, this is the way to tell a true war story, a story that makes you feel uncomfortable, and make you ask whether it is true or not. Sticking to his statements O’Brien thinks that “Speaking of courage” is not a true war story because it sounds realistic. There is nothing embarrassing or unrealistic about that story. O’Brien mentions it in his story “Notes,” that writing “Speaking of courage” felt like a sense of failure. “Almost immediately, though, there was a sense of failure. The details of Norman Bowker 's story were missing. In this original version…I had been forced to omit the shit field and the rain and the death of Kiowa…” (The things they carried, 158) This statement shows, that unless …show more content…
Nietzsche says, “If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.” (Truth and lies, 55) Through this statement he clearly means that if people are not satisfied they will exchange their sadness and loneliness with illusions; in other words, magic. Without realizing they will make their illusions the truth, which unfortunately is a lie. Like for example O’Brien talks about Jimmy Cross carrying love letters from Martha. Like he says, “In the late afternoon, after a day 's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire.”(The Things they carried, 1) In these few sentences, it depicts clearly that Jimmy is pretending, imagining his time with Martha. He pretends, and yet believes that Martha loves him like the way he loves her. For him this is real, and that is the element of magic. For the magic to work, Jimmy has to lie to himself and believe that this is the only truth. Another time magic has importance is when Ted Lavender gets shot in the head and Rat Kiley freaks out and starts yelling the obvious: “ Ted Lavender was shot in the head on his way back from peeing.... Oh
All things have an appearance, usually a good or a bad one. Depending on the appearance something has we form an opinion about it. Sometimes the appearance something has can mislead one in forming an accurate opinion about it. In Macbeth, Shakespeare shows us that things are not always as they appear to be. This is shown through the duplicity of Macbeth and his wife, the kings sons and the servants being blamed for Duncan's death and King Duncan's inaccurate opinions.
...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.”
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...
According to the Indian Times, madness is the rule in warfare (Hebert). The madness causes a person to struggle with experiences while in the war. In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the madness of the war caused the soldiers to react to certain situations within the environment differently. Tim O’Brien’s goal with the story “How to Tell a True War Story” is to shed light on the madness the soldiers face while in the war. Tim O’Brien tells the true story of Rat experiences of the war changing his life.
The deceitful interpretation presented in "How to tell a true war story", is an example of Historicism. Today, people hear about the vietnam war through family members, friends and veterans. When people tell war stories they try to make themselves seem victorious. It makes the person listening feel as if it was all in the good of the people by killing people. O'Brian somehow justifies a point in his book by stating, "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encouraged virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done." In actual reality more harm was done than good. People were forced off of their lands to hide in safety and the economic consequence is fatal. To derive to the point, O' Brian is saying there is no real war story if the audience feels that killing people had made a big and better consequence. To look back upon the Vietnam war it brought Vietnam to it's knees. The Americans assisted someone who asked them not to interfere and in the end there was no winner. The Americans had nothing to gain by fighting this war. The title was a contridictary of how to tell 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
A true war story isn’t always true, no matter what the author states about it. The moral of it is probably the only true part, with the other pieces being made up to grasp the reader’s attention. O’Brien stepped foot into Sanders’ shoes to find the moral under all the lies, and he did. Kidder met an man named Bill and found out his time in Vietnam, even though he made some parts up to make himself sound cooler.
O’Brien gives the reader an example of a true war story when he tells of the soldier that jumped on a grenade to save his friends however the grenade took all their lives away. On page 61, O'Brien states that this is a true war story that never happened. This is a true war story because it fits his criteria about how a war story should be but the story never actually happens. This is a true war story because it is sad because shows loss despite the soldier’s effort to save his
Friedrich Nietzsche’s On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense represents a deconstruction of the modern epistemological project. Instead of seeking for truth, he suggests that the ultimate truth is that we have to live without such truth, and without a sense of longing for that truth. This revolutionary work of his is divided into two main sections. The first part deals with the question on what is truth? Here he discusses the implication of language to our acquisition of knowledge. The second part deals with the dual nature of man, i.e. the rational and the intuitive. He establishes that neither rational nor intuitive man is ever successful in their pursuit of knowledge due to our illusion of truth. Therefore, Nietzsche concludes that all we can claim to know are interpretations of truth and not truth itself.
He states that as a soldier, there is so much to soak in from war scenes that it all becomes a muddled mess. Therefore, the story of the moment can be different from each soldier’s perspective due to the parts where each man puts in his own ideas. This leads to some speculation as to whether or not O’Brien’s stories are true or false.
In “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien, Orwell’s ideas are questioned and the competition between the truth and the underlying meaning of a story is discussed. O’Brien’s story depicts that the truth isn’t always a simple concept; and that not every piece of literature or story told can follow Orwell’s list of rules (Orwell 285). The story is told through an unnamed narrator as he re-encounters memories from his past as a soldier in the Vietnam War. With his recollection of past encounters, the narrator also offers us segments of didactic explanation about what a “true war story” is and the power it has on the human body (O’Brien 65). O’Brien uses fictional literature and the narration of past experiences to raise a question; to what extent should the lack of precision, under all circumstances, be allowed? In reality, no story is ever really truthful, and even if it is, we have no proof of it. The reader never feels secure in what they are being told. The reliability of the source, the author, and the narrator are always being questioned, but the importance of a story isn’t about the truth or the accuracy in which it is told, but about the “sunlight” it carries (O’Brien 81).
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a selfish Scottish thane becomes over-ambitious and commits several murders in order to gain and stay in power. After the murders, Macbeth evades suspicion by hiding his guilt and intentions, therefore deceiving others into thinking that he is innocent. Other characters including Lady Macbeth, the witches and the Scottish thanes also use their appearances to hide the truth and deceive others. With these examples, Shakespeare shows that appearances can be deceiving.
Reality is the state of being real or actual, whereas an illusion is a mental misinterpretation of what is believed to be true. Illusions often prevent people from perceiving reality and objective truths, which consequently results in delusions, and in some cases, tragedies. In Macbeth, a play written by William Shakespeare, the theme of illusion versus reality is overtly evident in the main character, Macbeth. Macbeth frequently misinterprets illusions as the actual reality due to possessing such an untamed ambition, which ultimately ends up resulting in a series of tragic and horrific events, for Macbeth and his victims. Macbeth’s ambition first leads him into believing that he is destined to become King of Scotland, which results in Duncan’s death. Macbeth’s ambition then affects his mental health, which causes him to mistake his hallucinations for reality, eventually resulting in further detrimental acts. Finally, Macbeth’s ambition blinds him into living a life of delusion, which causes him to reach his peak of arrogance and optimism, resulting in even further detriment and ultimately his very fall. Just as ambitions are incredibly illusive and detrimental in Macbeth, they can also be incredibly illusive and detrimental in our actual, modern day society.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair”; depicts that good is bad and bad is good. William Shakespeare’s Macbeth displays an interesting use of various themes. A theme that is used throughout the play is the contrast between appearance and reality. Similarly in the novel Great Expectations, Charles Dickens conveys the idea of deception as well. The authors demonstrate the idea of appearance vs. reality through crime, characters and through character’s ambitions.
Everyone has different views of reality and it is our nature to think the way we want. However, some people tend to distort the reality so that it fits their wants and needs. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Shakespeare demonstrates through the characters how easily we are deluded, not simply because others put on false appearances but also because we let ourselves be blinded by our own wants and needs. Delusions caused by false outward appearances are not significant compared to delusions caused by one’s wants and needs as being fooled by false outward appearances is temporary and anyone can be easily fooled by cleverly deceptive outward appearances, demonstrated by Olivia in Twelfth Night. On the other hand, delusions caused by our wants and needs are caused by us psychologically, which is more serious as people distort the reality and believes that distorted reality. Thus, delusions caused by one’s wants and needs are much more significant compared to simply being fooled by cleverly deceptive outward appearances.