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How Does Tim O Brien Use Story Telling In The Things They Carried

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The book The Things They Carried, written and narrated by Tim O’Brien, tells many stories of Alpha Company before, after and during the infamous Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien’s narration helps the reader understand the theme of Storytelling. The stories and chapters that highlight this theme the most are; The Lives of the Dead, which talks about O’Brien’s early friend Linda, The Man I Killed, which talks about the man Tim O’Brien killed and Good form, which delves into the truth about telling a real war-story.
O’Brien had told stories about a girl he was in love with when he was younger. Linda was the love of his life at age nine and she loved him just as much. Their love is shown when O’Brien Narrates; “Linda was nine the then, as I was, but we …show more content…

It was first triggered post-war when his daughter Kathleen asked him if he had ever killed someone else. Instinctively his answer was no, however, this was not the truth. O’Brien took the reader back to Vietnam on a night where he was on guard along a path. A young Vietnamese man, who was armed, came into view down the track. Without intention to kill, merely just to warn the man off, O’Brien through a grenade in his direction. The man froze with fear after taking two steps away from the grenade and died instantly. The scenes of the dead body were horrific and O’Brien stood in front of the body for some time staring, and beating himself up over it. Two accounts of how those events in the night on that beaten path were told but O’Brien could never quite come to terms with what he had done. O’Brien did say; “even now I haven’t finished sorting things out’, 20 years on from the event. Storytelling may be able to bring people back through memories but it will never be able to erase …show more content…

Tim O’Brien tried to be as honest and truthful as he could to be as honest and truthful, so that he could immerse the reader when they read his books. The Things They Carried tells events that O’Brien and other men in Alpha Company were there to witness, however events were understood and interpreted completely different by each individual. O’Brien needed to tell stories to recover to and cope but he could never tell them to exact detail. Kiowa's death was told differently twice. Norman Bowker's account claimed that he had woken to find Kiowa's body sunken into the muck where once lay with only small bubbles left. This story could be the truth but O'Brien told a slightly different story. O'Brien admits his fault in the truth by saying; "even that story was made up". This statement showed the reader that the events tolds were real but they were not truthful. O'Brien needed storytelling to feel better about his friends death even though it may have been

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Tim O’Brien felt to this day just like it happened when he died. The author wants the readers to understand that storytelling/ memory is a strong strenght to have. “ He showed him what hed done and asked if everything was square between them” ( O’Brien 61). The author wants the readers to understand how important it is to treat one another. It was important to the story of the two men because they had to eventually get over it like war

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In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, a story is told to exemplify how war can change a person. It expresses the humane side of war, the struggle to overcome grief and how difficult it is to deal with death. The book releases strong emotions and allows the reader to really connect with the characters involved. Tim O’Brien enables the audience to feel the emotions emerging from the book by writing it as fiction. With O'Brien's decision to write his novel as fiction allows him to more accurately convey emotion behind each story he has to tell.

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In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.

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Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are". (O'Brien 38) O’Brien uses his stories to reach his audience. There are generations of people who have no clue what war is really like, whether it is because of our misconceptions based on what media portrays or the fact that there are people who have not served in the military. Some people might know about Vietnam and know the outcome of the war, but they don’t have the experience and real life understanding of how that story ended. They might not be able to fully understand the feelings of a soldier.

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O’Brien begins thinking about how the soldier’s life must have been, simply by going off of his description. O’Brien says that this soldier loved math but was bullied for being smart and having a miniscule body. O’Brien also says that this soldier was told many stories about brave warriors who served their country just like us, but the soldier was scared, and he prayed that he wouldn’t become old enough to fight. This moment of O’Brien seeing life from the enemy’s shoes gives the reader sympathy for the vietcong soldier. O’Brien explaining this now gives a new way to connect to our “enemy” and truly questions if anyone in war is purely evil or purely

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present” (179). Though the happening-truth was that O’Brien never killed anyone during the war, the story-truth made up by O’Brien himself is that he did. The emotions he felt were of such strong grief that that what he remembers and tells is that he killed someone, because in his mind he

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This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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Within the chapter “Ambush”, there is a lot of shame and regret. When O’Brien’s daughter Kathleen said, “You keep writing these war stories, so I guess you must’ve killed somebody.” O’Brien disputed this at first, and said of course not. He then recalls one particular instance when he was pulling a pin out of a grenade. He wanted to warn the young man that was getting ready to be blown away, but O’Brien didn’t say anything to try to help.

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War was so much more than just war to O’Brien and he able to share this through his writing. " But this is true: stories can save us. ... in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (page

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