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

“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

“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

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