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Tim O 'Brien's How To Tell A True War In Miniature'

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“How to Tell a True ‘War in Miniature’”
A great novel about war is not one that details the events of violence or gore, but, rather, one that extracts and conveys the raw emotions of all involved. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien achieves the perfect balance between sharing truth, instilling empathy, and crafting engaging fiction. American author, Elliot Ackerman, asserts that different experiences or events can encapsulate “the war in miniature”. Composed of short stories, each chapter in The Things They Carried may be interpreted in this way. However, the chapter that most eloquently encompasses “the war in miniature” is “How to Tell a True War Story” because it effectively captures the “overwhelming ambiguity” (78) of war, persuasively …show more content…

“How to Tell a True War Story” reflects this feeling of chaos and lack of control with jumps between war stories and existential commentary without a constant setting or a linear plot. “In the midst of evil” (77) everything is unexpected, unfathomable, and terrifying. By instilling in the reader questions about the factual reliability of the narrator with statements that denounce the importance of “that kind of truth” (79), the chapter expresses the “ambiguity” (78) that a soldier experiences, and communicates that reality lies in the experience rather than the facts. Moreover, during war there is the permeating and constant feeling of “a ghostly fog” (78) that clouds vision of anything new and undermines accuracy which parallels the fog of confusion that the narrator faces. Without any “clarity”, “chaos” becomes a constant and the “only certainty” (78) is that nothing is predictable, nothing is as it seems, since all is …show more content…

Soldiers create intimate and valuable relationships. Curt Lemon and Rat form a close relationship and they can trust each other “with [their lives]” (65). Yet, Rat loses Curt because soldiers frequently lose these relationships because of war’s “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (66). Losing one’s best friend is “so incredibly sad and true” (66), but it is an everyday occurrence during war. Concluding the chapter, the narrator determines that war “is never about war”, and is solely about the “love”, “sorrow” (81), and memories shared. Despite this pronouncement, the chapter undermines this exclamation since violence plays a defining role in all the stories shared. In reality, war is an amalgam of everything - violence and peace, love and hate, certainty and

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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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Most war stories are labeled as fiction or nonfiction; however Tim O’Brien breaks this rule in The Things They Carried by creating a fictitious story that yet seeps the truth, and labelling it as a work of fiction. The book is compiled of various stories that correlate together, but it can be unclear what is fact and what is fiction. O’Brien purposely does this to draw in the reader to question what is and what isn’t, and no one exactly knows the right answer. By utilizing intentional, rhetorical tactics, O’Brien has the power of blurring the lines between fact and fiction; which allows the reader to distinguish between fact and fiction in chapters, such as “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, “Stockings”, and “Speaking of Courage”.

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But Tim O’brien flips those ideas upside down using the chapter “How To Tell A True War Story” in The Things They Carried. The reader learns of a young man whose best friend dies in war, and how he writes a letter to the sister about his life, only to never get one in return. Throughout this chapter, the reader learns how truly contradictory the idea of a “true war story” really is. With a reflective and didactic tone, Tim O’brien effectively teaches those who have not fought in a war how to tell a true war story-- that “a

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And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’” (77). We can never assume the truth in a war story. The only way to discover the truth hidden behind the lies is to pull away the many layers or in this case the stories that make up a war

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Although the soldier he killed was an enemy soldier, instead of vilifying him he was able to humanize the man. O’Brien was able to describe the physical appearance of the soldier and imagine her life before war. The author was able to portray an emotional connection and made the line between friend and enemy almost vanish. This was able to reveal the natural beauty of shared humanity even in the context of war’s horror. O’Brien is able to find the beauty in the midst of this tragic and horrible event.

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In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.

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The components of a “true” war story are defined through its moral and purpose. A “true” war story

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Tim O’Brien discusses the characteristics of a true war story and how to distinguish a true story from the fake or made-up one in his essay, “How to Tell a True War Story.” He criticizes many aspects of storytelling and mentions the behavior of a true story. In addition to O’Brien’s theory on how to distinguish true vs false, Malcolm Gladwell also helps in differentiating the two by discussing the story about Bernie Goetz in his essay “The Power of Context.” Both the authors point out the main characteristics that needs to be noted in order to understand the difference between fact/ truth and belief/ cooked up story. Though O’Brien is very open about his arguments, Gladwell’s arguments are invisible to audience because he does not openly state

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Tim O’Brien Research Essay Truth is something that Tim O’Brien wants his readers to comprehend about war throughout his writing. For example in The Things They Carried O’Brien mentions that he doesn’t support the Vietnam war, but he supports the fact that he is fighting for his country and for their safety. “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.” (The Things They Carried,39) O’Brien uses figurative language to emphasis his writing and uses symbolism to convey the importance of a message to the readers.

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Metafiction is a literary technique used by Tim O’Brien to frequently remind the readers of the fictional quality of his war stories and to emphasize the relations between fiction and reality. “Good Form” is an example of metafiction because it not only accounts for the reason why Tim O’Brien produces made-up stories—to deliver his personal feelings to the audience—but also makes the readers realize that The Things They Carried is a work of fiction, instead of a description of the reality. Tim O’Brien also applies metafiction to previous chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story”, and both chapters express the notion that feelings or morals are greater than facts. “Good Form” directly informs the readers about the author’s fabrication on the

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Author Tim O’Brien once expressed, “It can be argued, for instance, that [the Vietnam] war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty….a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly”(O’Brien 77). The breathtaking yet sanguinary jungles and devastating guerilla warfare of the Vietnam War had a particular grandeur that overwhelmed its victims, and the author of The Things They Carried demonstrates that element throughout many passages in his collection of short stories. In Tim O’Brien’s historical novel The Things They Carried, he uses the clash of breathtaking beauty with horrendous imagery and grim concepts to establish the theme of the dark beauty of war through the lens of his

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O’Gorman begins the article by discussing O’Brien’s earlier war novels and describing how from the beginning he was placed in the ranks of contemporary war writers who were trying to record what was happening in the bloody battles of Vietnam. O’Gornan discusses and uses quotes from O’Brien’s novels If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, and more to show how O’Brien had a wide scope of literature. O’Gorman then goes into discussing how O’Brien links to traditional war writers such as Cooper, Crane, and Hemmingway, and how he was influenced by Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and more writers. However, O’Gorman’s main analysis of The Things They Carried was in the form of the book, the novel is a composite novel comprised of short stories that flow together to create a whole text. O’Gorman believes that O’Brien composed this form because he felt compelled to move from traditional linear novels to something more complex and richer, in choosing this form he is not just writing about war stories but rather stories of humanity.

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War Stories The over glorification of war in America overshadows the real experiences and tales of soldiers who fought in them. War is often painted as a tragic memory, an honorable battle, or even made just to draw sympathy from the audience. Writers like Tim O’Brien make it clear that real war stories are nothing like the ones we hear about. A true war story can be defined by its clear lack of morals and its ability to make the impossible seem possible.

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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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Literary analysis America’s war heroes all have the same stories to tell but different tales. Prescribed with the same coloring page to fill in, and use their methods and colors to bring the image to life. This is the writing style and tactic used by Tim O’Brien in his novel, “The Things They Carried”. Steven Kaplan’s short story criticism, The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, provides the audience with an understanding of O’Brien’s techniques used to share “true war” stories of the Vietnam War. Kaplan explains the multitude of stories shared in each of the individual characters, narration and concepts derived from their personal experiences while serving active combat duty during the Vietnam War,

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