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Analysis Of How To Tell A True War Story 'By Tim O' Brien

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In Tim O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, there is a chapter called How to Tell a True War Story. In this chapter, he states how you should never trust a “true war story” because many aspects go into a war story. He characterizes them; at the end of the day, you are the listener and should be skeptical. Ask questions and be curious. The first characteristic is the persistence of memory. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” A true war story persists in the narrator's memory. It becomes part of their identity and shapes their worldview. So for example, in the narration of Curt Lemons's death, O’Brien describes Curt’s death and how he remembers it. He describes the smell of explosives and the shock of the event in its entirety. He admits that he had looked away for a second so he didn’t get the full scene. …show more content…

No one can see the entire dice at the same time. A true war story is multifaceted and cannot be reduced to a single narrative. It contains multiple layers of truth that reflect the complications of war. For Curt Lemon’s death, everyone had different aspects of how he died. Some only heard the detonator go off and see Lemon’s remains in the trees. Some had been watching the whole time. But no one person can tell you exactly what happened from each side. “Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.” In this contradiction, he is giving us the idea that absolute truth doesn’t exist. Truth comes from different perspectives. Many people can share the truth, but it will not be the same. We depend on others to feed us information on things we do not know. Whether or not they are being truthful you may not know. They may not know they are spreading

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As Tim O'Brien discusses Curt Lemon's death, he effectively highlights the underlying paradoxes of a war story's truths by telling the same story in three accounts that each differ in diction, mood, tone, and sometimes imagery. For example, in the first paragraph, O'Brien utilizes a neutral, objective tone as he briefly lists the events before, during, and after Lemon's death. How so? O'Brien implicates his staunch neutrality in the middle of the first paragraph, where he nonchalantly recants, "He [Curt Lemon] was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead." Here O'Brien seems to be playing with the audience's emotions, as he intentionally uses phrases such as "playing catch" and "laughing" to indicate vibrancy and child-like

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In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the main theme is how to tell whether a war story is true or made-up. The author explores the conflict within reality and fiction by arguing that true war stories are hard to believe. In O’Brien’s view, he points out that “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. ”(p.80). Moreover, to make his point, the author spins between facts and fiction causing difficulty for the readers to believe if those stories actually happened or

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O’Brien says that a true war story is something you believe with your stomach and has no moral. For O’Brien, something isn’t true unless it feels true. A true war story should leave you with a deeper emotional connection. For example, the death of Rat Kiley’s best friend is a true war story because it has no moral.

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Tim O’Brien, born in Austin, Minnesota, grew up with a common childhood. At 7 years old, he and his family moved to Worthington, Minnesota. Once O’Brien graduated high school, he attended Macalester College. There, he got drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, though he opposed it. The time O’Brien spent in Vietnam had a major impact on his life.

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The Veracity of War One who is inexperienced and uneducated with war can have many thoughts and opinions about the subject, but only those who have experienced war can understand its true meaning, or lack thereof. In 1990, Tim O’Brien published an appalling, loathsome collection of short stories called The Things They Carried. O’Brien’s experiences in the Vietnam war is what influenced him to write the truth about war, or his version of the truth. O’Brien depicted this by describing his own warped and questionable story; “The Man I Killed.” Chris Kyle, another American author, later wrote in 2012 an enthralling, morbid memoir called American Sniper.

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In the chapter, How to Tell a True War Story, he emphasizes this a lot. “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.”

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Storytelling has such a large impact on all stages of life. Stories are told to teach a lesson, give hope, or get someone through a hard time. Tim O’Brien uses storytelling in his book, The Things They Carried, to teach lessons from war, and help readers understand about the baggage people bring to war. The publisher section of this novel has this warning in it, "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life all incidents, names, and characters are imaginary” (O'Brien).

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O’Brien often describes this as “accurate representation,” he does this throughout his book within his portrayals of each individual story or character. What I mean by this is that the author gives an truthful story of what happened, he may add a few extra details but at the end it is the truth in the way he perceives it and the way he wants his readers

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In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores the power of storytelling as a means of conveying the complex experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Throughout the novel, O’Brien distinguishes between "Happening Truth," which refers to objective facts of events, and "Story Truth," which refers to the subjective emotional and psychological realities of those events. Through the use of these two concepts, O’Brien creates a series of interconnected stories that blur the line between fact and fiction, and ultimately serves as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling itself. The novel is comprised of a series of interconnected stories, each of which focuses on a particular aspect of the Vietnam War.

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“The way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms [67]” The way he said that made the readers think if it was true or more of “it happened so fast and I don’t want to remember it so I’m going to make up things “or more of an exaggeration. ‘’ 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 is necessary to make you believe the truly

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O'Brien shows us that "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." (pg. 71).

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This is also true of Tim O’Brien as he narrates from Vietnam, in the midst of the Vietnam war, how to tell a true war story. As readers find out though, a true war story is not always true, and “cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical” (O’Brien 3). Through various memories, O’Brien proclaims that if one is going to tell a war story, although it is ironic, they must insert lies to make the truth sound real. He explains that “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” (O’Brien 3).

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“If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.” - (O’Brien, 1990, P. 65) This nature allows a complex insight into the narrator as a veteran and how the war impacted his idea of truth and storytelling, further knocking any pre-conceived notions that may have been present in the reader of war veterans. The idea that the stories being told aren’t factually true is a shocking statement to those who haven’t been through a

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“How to Tell a True War Story” and “Ambush” are stories that both explore on topics: truth, the real definition of a true war story, and the role of truth. O 'Brien starts off “How to Tell a True War Story” with “This is true.” Starting this story with such a bold sentence not only makes it seem more true, but to some extent, it acts as a comfort statement to the narrator’s own doubts, as if there were unspeakable uncertainties and lies of the narrator. The title of this story also comes into play, with a meta-fictional name “How to Tell a True War Story”, as if it were a guide, a manual, having a true war story tell the readers how to tell a true war story. However ironically, towards the middle of the story, us as

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Telling a true war story can be hard to do, because soldiers are tempted to change some traumatic aspects to make the story easier to comprehend, and not so traumatic for the listener. For the readers who prefer the brutal and gruesome stories,

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