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

1163 Words5 Pages

In his excerpt “How to Tell a True War Story”, from his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explains that a true war story is not moral, does not stop the things that have always happened, is obscene, is surreal, is detailed, does not depend on exact truth, and leaves people with nothing much to say besides “Oh.” Based on Tim O’Brien’s depiction of a “true war story”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five is an acutely authentic story of war. Of the many points Tim O’Brien makes about true war stories, one of them touches on morality. O’Brien states that “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 the things they have always done.” This reveals …show more content…

He writes, “Happeningness is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Vonnegut’s stories of Tralfamadore never really happened, but they reveal more truth than some events that actually happened. Vonnegut writes about the Tralfamadorians interest in Charles Darwin, stating, “The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind… is Charles Darwin--who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements” (pg 210). Tralfamadorians do not exist, of course, but their teachings and beliefs help Vonnegut cope with the war. If everyone is supposed to die at some point, then all those lives taken during the war were meant to be taken. This is a truth that veterans of the war, and any human being, really, can latch onto in order to process something that does not make sense. Vonnegut does not care to write a war story that is technically true, one that tells every detail as it happened. He tells the truth how it is to him, and that is how O’Brien says a true war story is. Whether it happened or not is besides the

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How Does Tim O Brien Tell A True War Story?

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For example in the chapter, O’Brien announces that “A true war story is never moral”(O’Brien 65), but, later on in the chapter he contradicts himself conveying that “ In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth ”(O’Brien 74). He starts off saying a true war story has no morals, but then he explains that the moral means everything to a war story, which contradicts his earlier statement. This contradictory excerpt from the chapter parallels the idea of the Vietnam war in the fact that to make peace, there had to be war and bloodshed to solve the problem that the United States and North Vietnam had with one another. War is contradictory in itself ,and O’Brien’s contradictory motif illustrates it well. In fact, the idea of war is a reoccurring topic in “How to Tell a True War Story,” and O’Brien illustrates this idea of war with many other devices as

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In the film American Sniper directed by Clint Eastwood and the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, both works exhibit depiction of war through the protagonist. However, each work is portrayed differently as they each show a representation with opposite depiction of war. While one decides to promote war, the other diminish it. In Eastwood’s adaptation of American Sniper, his insight appears as a promotion for pro-war propaganda, in contrast, Slaughterhouse Five depicts ideas that portray the war in a poor light. American Sniper retells the story of Chris Kyle, a Navy Seal who was reported to have 160 confirmed kills.

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(page 68). This is why Tim O’Brien writes the way he does. He wants the reader to believe his story and get a sense of what war is truly

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True war stories are hard to tell, because of the guilt from things seen and those not seen. True stories do not allow the author to see things he never saw, so creating new images are necessary to create the story. True war stories are too subjective; even if it is true to someone it may not be true to the other. O’Brien says the only thing a true war story needs is to be asked if it is true, “and if it matters you got your answer” (O’Brien 79). It does not need to be factually true to make it a true war story.

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History does not always convey the absolute truth. It offers only one side of the story. The strong and powerful voices always drown out the sounds of the weak and beaten. The winner’s word will always be taken over the loser’s. The content that lies within the textbooks was not written by the defeated.

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Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five chronicles the life of Billy Pilgrim, a fictional character loosely based on Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II. The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s fictional novel that is set during the height of the Vietnam War. Both authors incorporate fact and fantasy scenes in their writings, albeit in different contexts. Vonnegut’s novel travels throughout time and brings the reader to both non-fictional and fantastical scenes. Conversely, O’Brien’s novel is written in chronological order, but also incorporates fact and fantasy into the timeline of the story.

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How To Tell A True War Story Analysis

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Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.

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Although the concepts of truth are the same, no person will have the same exact definition of truth. Many people can share a truth, but none of them will always be the same. In O'Brien's The Things They Carried, there's an excerpt called How to Tell a True War Story, an example of O’Brien’s claim can be found when he talks about Mitchell Sanders’ story. It involves a troop that went into the mountains for a listening post operation. He mentions that these men began to hear strange echoes and music, which frightens them.

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Why Is Telling A True War Story Hard Lots of stories are hard to comprehend because they’re more brutal and traumatic for listeners, even the story-teller. In three stories: “The Man I Killed”, “How To Tell A True War Story”, and “Speaking of Courage”, Tim O’Brien showed how changing certain parts of a story and making them graceful, can make them easier to comprehend. However sometimes telling the story the way it was makes it brutal and gruesome, though some listeners prefer that over gracefulness.

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In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, the use of an analogy, diction, and irony contribute to the anti-war portrait of Billy Pilgrim by illuminating that society’s futile and cataclysmic war efforts cause more damage than results, making war utterly useless in the grand scheme of life. One occurrence of the anti-war message Vonnegut creates in his novel is expressed when Vonnegut writes, regarding Billy Pilgrim, “He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.” (23). This analogy to a stage play continues throughout the novel and has a strong anti-war message within it. Vonnegut constantly ties plays to Billy to demonstrate that war is romanticized

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