Peter Matsumoto AP English Literature Mrs. Nellon 9/15/15 The Things They Carried Analysis Question 4 The buffalo incident is perhaps one of the, if not the, most memorable sequence of events in the entirety of the novel, as its inhumanely grotesque and uncomfortably relatable style of storytelling highlights the questions of loss, truth, and morality inherent throughout the book, condensing into three short pages the strongest argument the novel has to offer: the nature of truth. According to O’Brien, “A true war story is never moral” (65). When something is true, it just is. Rat Kiley’s story isn’t moral. The buffalo incident isn’t moral. However, it is undeniably the truth in the context of the story, despite its being fiction. O’Brien also says that “A true war story … makes the …show more content…
It is so raw and truthful that there is no way it could be false. Finally, “The truths are contradictory” (77). Amidst the horror and the gore and the pain and the death, there is beauty. There is serenity. There is peace. On the topic of morality: to be moral is to know the distinction between right and wrong, or to have that distinction in general. The truth in war, O’Brien argues, is never moral. If the truth is moral, then it is a lie (65). Even if the truth is the story-truth (171), it can be more real more true, and more astonishing than the whole of the real truth. In the case of the slaughter of the buffalo, morality has been stripped from the story. Rat Kiley’s judgement hath fled to brutish beasts and he hath lost his reason. O’Brien uses an almost matter-of-fact style of writing to describe the events as they occurred, for example when Rat Kiley begins the ceremony: “He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee … He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back” (75).