Summary Of Ambush By Tim O Brien

772 Words4 Pages

In the short story " Ambush " by Tim O'Brien, the artistic value surpasses the short story " Big Boy " by David Sedaris because of the way Tim uses dialogue, the time moving technique and the way he wrote his story as a first person different from David helped the story be more interesting. The first thing comes in readers’ mind is time moving. People will be really impressed by the way Tim used it to describe the time passes and his day dream moment. " For the first few moments I felt lost, not sure about directions, groping for my helmet and weapon. I reached out and found three grenades and lined them up in front of me; the pins had already been straightened for quick throwing. And then for maybe half an hour I kneeled there and waited. …show more content…

Although Ambush has " “You keep writing war stories,” she said, “so I guess you must’ve killed somebody.” It was a difficult moment, but I did what seemed right, which was to say, “Of course not,” Tim successfully showed his struggle in this little text. This small text tells us the reason why he writes this story, his shame when he told lie to his daughter, his guilty and shame. When in " Big Boy " all of the dialogues are not really mean anything " "I'll be out in a second!" "Here I come. I'm just washing up!". There is no artistic value in there. It is just a normal talk which anyone can write it. That is one of the points why there is a huge artistic value gap between " Ambush " and " Big Boy " By writing the story as the first person, Tim was able to write down the conflict war between his mind and soul, how the conversation between him and his daughter or " the good kill " - his mate 's opinion about the incident - affect him during " He told me that it was a good kill, that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed" or " Even now I haven’t finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don’t" . When David as the first person point of view doesn't help readers to know how that situation is going to affect