What Are The Similarities Between Slaughterhouse Five And The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien and Slaughterhouse Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, and both books that are an example of anti-war in literature. Both O’Brien and Vonnegut were both war veterans and put themselves in their own books. The books both portray the horrors of war.
In both these novels they spoke on the destructiveness of war and how it also destroys the way a person thinks. They have discussed on how they cope with all the things they went through at war. These men were all sent to war because the government said they needed to and it was not by choice. It was something they needed to do because that is how society was back then. The connections the authors have with their characters in the novels allows them to

The authors often time don't tell the story exactly as it happened in real life. They both change the story to evoke the emotions out of the readers. As O’Brien said in the chapter “Notes,” on how the story about Norman Bower “that part of the story is my own” (O’Brien 161). In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut begins “All this happened, more or less” (Vonnegut 1). There is such thing of story-truth and story-happening. “Happening-truth is an objective factual account of events which occurred. Story-truth, sometimes referred to as emotional truth, is a subjective reflection of a person’s thoughts and feelings about the same event when retelling that story” (IGI Global). These authors being war veterans, write these stories and change them up a bit to cope with what they have experienced at war. As O’Brien writes in the novel, “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (O’Brien 179). O’Brien often writes in story-truth to let the readers live that experience with him and feel what he felt during that time. He lets the readers wonder if these stories are true or not. Their goal was to make readers feel the pain, the

They depict the life when they are at war and also post war. The authors views on war are also similar to each other. They both considered death not a big deal because it’s something normal to them now being part of the war. They talk about people dying and then move on from it like it did not mean anything to them. Another similarity that these two authors share is that they both satirize war. What their main goal of writing their books was to show the real horrors of war and not the bloody parts of it. They never intended to show how bloody and messy war could get. They wanted go show the real life effects of it and how it could affect their