...Vietnam was a questionable War. People either agreed with it or did not agree at all. As people fought over it back in America soldiers got an experience they will never forget. An experienced filled with terror and suffering but also filled with friendship and love. American literature has shown the struggles of the soldiers in the Vietnam War. Often times the literature tries to pull the readers in with stories to help them understand what life was like. Tim O’Brien is one of the most popular when it comes to this. In his novel, The Things They Carried, questioning morality, O’Brien gives first hand narrations of stories which show the impact of the Vietnam War on society. Tim O’Brien’s life is filled with many wonders and success. O’Brien...
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...English Composition I 14 April 2012 Tim O’Brien Readers familiar with details from O’Brien personal life find in this novel “links” between his art and his life. The New York Times selected the book The Things They Caried as one of the best works of war fiction for the year, and Chicago Tribute awarded the novel its Heartland Prize. According to O'Brien, in using these interrelated sections of facts, story, confession, commentary, and narration of other people's experiences, he forced himself to invent a new form that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, short story and novel, memory and imagination. Tim O’Brien, who describes himself as “strict realist”, who dismisses critics labels of “surrealist” or “magical realist”, but admit, that he is “war writer”. Tim O’Brien uses a mixture of facts and fictions (truth and reality) to reveal the complexities of war. Tim O’Brien mixes truth and fiction in his stories. O’Brien explores the way stories are told throughout his work . In his stories he demonstrate the way truth always seems to be around the next story. Tim O’Brien himself revised his stories. In his novel are revision, after revision of what could happened, what might have happened, what did happened and what did not happened. The things they carried as a complete work is different from reading the stories...
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...Tim O’Brien is a marvel of storytelling, composed of multiple stories of soldiers during the Vietnam War. These stories give an insight into the physical and emotional burden experienced by the soldiers in the war, however in the concluding chapter “The Lives of the Dead,” it takes a different direction. Instead of focusing on the realities of combat, this chapter focuses on the childhood memory of the narrator and author O’Brien, showing us his first love, Linda, and how she had a tragic death. This departure from the war narrative is not a distraction but a deliberate choice that serves to connect the pain of losing his first love, Linda, with a broader theme of trauma. Through this chapter, the narrator proves that trauma is a persistent force, deeply embedded in memory and integral to human experience. In "The Lives of the Dead” O’Brien reflects on the impact that Linda had on his life. This personal loss marked his first encounter with death, a theme that resonates throughout the whole...
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...going to students and historians on the topic of the Vietnam War. Each chapter brings a new area, which needs to be addressed about how to remember the war from the viewpoint of the women. She states, “had to face up to met own ignorance of Vietnam’s postwar circumstance, to figure out why women warriors, so essential to Vietnam’s long history… have remained invisible to most Americans,” (page 6). Overall, this book is a great read to open the eyes of the reader to an untold story of hardships and struggles. While, Turner is respectful to the culture of Vietnams people, it is hard to fully understand the importance of this topic. Yes, it is important to understand a forget history of gender during warfare. But, the way she sets out to write her book is hard to follow at some points in the book. Through out her book, it felt as if she was trying to do too much in a short amount of pages. Turner has great oral stories for the reader to learn about, but it felt as if it was rushed. The...
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...plans regarding Vietnam?” The essay will compare and contrast how the United States reacts to Vietnam before and after the Tet Offensive, while also evaluating any other factors that might also had a role. Since the Tet Offensive is a series of events, the essay will analyze all effects since the start of the offensive through the end. Source 1: “Tet” section of “Vietnam: A history” by Stanley Karnow Stanley Karnow worked for Time, Life, the Washington Post, and NBC to cover Asia from 1959-1974. He started to write this secondary source book when he arrived in Vietnam on July 1959. The book serves to...
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...that each soldier had to bear during the Vietnam War while fighting for their country. Witnessing horrific scenes of war and the emotional and physical burdens that each of them carried, O’Brien unfolds how these men had no choice but to fulfill their patriotic duty. As the leader of the platoon, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross goes through an inner conflict between love and duty, carrying his orders in his mind and Martha in his heart. But how far can war or following orders, impair the human side of compassion and love? Although, soldiers become men at war, O’Brien focuses in a story where war makes men emotionally handicap, leaving mental scars that may never heal. The story is told by a third person’s point of view, however, O’Brien includes a touch of his personal experiences during the war where he spent a year in Vietnam (Hicks). As Josiah Bunting said, “The things he carried into war are very different from what he carried away from it” (Bunting) expressing O’Brien’s experience at war and how his experience as a soldier would convince readers to believe that the different traumatic moments really happened. Although his personal experiences are counted as relevant, some critics consider his storytelling to be “nothing new about trying to tell war stories- that the “truths” they contain “are contradictory”, elusive and this indeterminate”. Kaplan goes on saying that “representation includes staging what might have happened in Vietnam while simultaneously questioning the accuracy...
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...Michelle Zhang Dr. Bloomquist 2/13/2015 Rhetorical Analysis A Whole New World: Construction and Destruction in The Things They Carried While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the struggles that soldiers who fought in the war faced before, during, and after the war faced. These stories serve as an outlet for O’Brien, allowing both a cathartic release of his experiences and a documentation of the significant experiences that shaped him. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explores the psychological destruction that fighting in the war encompassed while he was still a soldier as well as many years after being out of the war. In one of the stories, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien encapsulates the psychological devastation he faced after he kills a Vietnamese soldier, his first time ever killing a man. However, in revealing his experience, he attempts to remove himself from the situation by using the third person to portray...
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...Anyone know about the symbolism in ‘A Quiet American’ by Graham Greene? | Pyle represents the idealistic New Age America, thirsty for heroism. Phuong represents pre-war Vietnam, passive, innocent. What exactly does Fowler represent? Is it the wisdom and world-weariness of Old Europe or Britain’s involvement in the war simply for personal gain? | The symbolism of the individual characters has to be placed within the context of colonialism, since that was the relationship between the nations they each represented. Pyle's motives are far from heroic. An idealism that is motivated by interventionism in a Third World country's affairs can be dangerous and destructive, not only in the way Graham Greene saw it in the early fifties, but as history proved it by the events that unfolded years later, leading to the US war in Viet Nam. Or for what is happening now in Iraq, if you will. Fowler had the "old colonialist" wisdom that questioned Pyle's justification for violence. He had already learned that "democracy" is something many countries neither understand nor want, and any foreign attempt to impose it is doomed to failure. I don't know that this helps, but I can't see the novel any other way. | | Outline of characters | Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in his fifties who has been covering the French war in Viet Nam for over two years. He meets a young American idealist named Alden Pyle, who is a student of York Harding. Harding's theory is that neither Communism nor...
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...375-B01 Paper The Vietnam War was a war of change. It took America into a new frontier. With President John F. Kennedy pushing to end communism, Vietnam looked like the ideal place to accomplish his goals. Even though the war pushed on after his death, President Nixon sought to put an end to the war and bring American troops home. Even though these presidents had very differing opinions of the war, the Vietnam War raged on, changing America politically, culturally, and socially. Before the Vietnam War broke out, Kennedy and Nixon both had military backgrounds. Kennedy was in the United States Navy from 1941-1945. “On August 2, 1943 [during World War 2], as PT 109 was running silent to avoid detection it was struck by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri.” This devastating accident resulted in Kennedy saving his men and then receiving many metals and honors for this heroic act. This occurrence changed Kennedy for life. Nixon as well was in the United States Navy from 1942-1946. Nixon saw no combat during his time in the navy however he was officer in charge of the Combat Air Transport Command at Guadalcanal in the Solomon’s and then at Green Island. Nixon became a Lieutenant Commander which set the stage for his future career as President. These two men had very different experience at war which contributed to the way they viewed war and responded to it. This military history in each of these men’s lives, proved vital in the way they responded to the Vietnam War during their time...
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...Mr. Macomber English 3 AP Syllabus 1.5 English 3 AP Course Overview Students in this introductory college-level course read and carefully analyze a broad and challenging range of nonfiction prose selections, deepening their awareness of rhetoric and how language works. Through close reading and frequent writing, students develop their ability to work with language and texts in order to establish greater awareness of purpose and strategy, while strengthening their own composing abilities. C16 Students examine rhetoric in essays, images, movies, novels, and speeches. They frequently confer about their writing by conferencing in class. C 14 Feedback is given both before and after students revise their work to help them develop logical organization, enhanced by specific techniques to increase coherence. Rhetorical structures, graphic organizers, and work on repetition, transitions, and emphasis are addressed. I comment on individual drafts, and I write memos to the class in a blog about whole-class concerns such as specificity of quotations, parallelism, and transitions. C13 Simultaneously, students review the simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence classifications. We examine word order, length, and surprising constructions. Loose and periodic sentences are introduced. We examine sample sentences and discuss how change affects tone, purpose, and credibility of the author/speaker. In addition, feedback on producing sentence structure variety...
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...subjects such as labor laws and social security. We as a society want to live better lives and improve the quality of our lives and so by looking at the past we can make changes in the future to benefit our future generations. In my view without studying history there would be no progressive future. I think many people have a negative view on studying history because they can’t seem to find a connection to how history relates or affects their lives. I believe that anyone can find something interesting to study in history. It’s just a matter of finding a way for them to connect with a subject on a personal or professional level. Maybe someone does not like American history but they might enjoy studying their own family history. Through that they might find that an ancestor had an important impact on American history. Another way a person might find studying history relevant in their life is through work. If the person is passionate about the work they do, studying the history of that profession in order to perform better in the future...
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...history, and indeed it is obliged to do so.”1 The social and political revolutions of 1960s have made fulfilling such a responsibility less daunting than ever. Invaluable references, including Darlene Clark Hine, ed. Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Evelyn Brooks Higgingbotham, ed., Harvard Guide to African American History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Arvarh E. Strickland and Robert E. Weems, Jr., eds., The African American Experience: An Historiographical and Bibliographical Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); and Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds., Dictionary of Afro- American Slavery (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988), provide informative narratives along with expansive bibliographies. General texts covering major historical events with attention to chronology include John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000), considered a classic; along with Joe William Trotter, Jr., The African American 1  Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001); and, Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, The African American Odyssey (Upper Saddle River: Printice-Hall, Inc., 2000). Other general texts not to be overlooked are Colin A. Palmer’s Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America Vol. I: 1619-1863 and Vol. II (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998)...
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...lifestyle and radical beliefs. Hippies came from many different places and had many different backgrounds. All Hippies were young, from the ages of 15 to 25 (Hippie). They left their families and did it for many different reasons. Some rejected their parents' ideas, some just wanted to get away, and others simply were outcasts, who could only fit in with the Hippie population. Fewer than twenty-five became a magical age. Young people all over the world were united by this bond (MacFarlane, 71). This bond was of Non-conformity and it was the Creed of the Young (MacFarlane, 75). Most Hippies came from wealthy middle class families. Some people said that they were spoiled and wasting their lives away. But to Hippies themselves this was a way of life and no one was going to get in the way of their dreams and ambitions. Hippies flocked to a certain area of San Francisco on the corner of Haight Street and Ashbury Street, where the world got their first view of this unique group. This place came to be known as the Haight Ashbury District. There were tours of the district and it was said...
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...Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey 1. What is your initial response to the novel? Do you find it interesting or tedious? Does it remind you of any other stories? Explain why you think it is. My initial response to the novel was an expectation that it would involve darker themes such as racism since one’s review on the book stated it as “An Australian’s To Kill a Mockingbird” alongside with a picture of a boy for the book cover which made him mysterious in a way for potential readers to be curious about. As for the first few minutes reading the novel, it started off rather tedious as nothing much was established in the story but after the first sign of conflict which ultimately is the driving plot of the novel did the novel became an interesting read. It starts off without a proper introduction rather just simply a phrase “Jasper Jones is here” creating this sense of mystery and curiosity for the readers which was quite effective in doing so. This novel shares certain elements to common crime and mystery novels. Elements such as the unknown killer, a progressive plot that cause readers to create theories on who is the true killer, and most likely a plot twist near the end where every major and minor event in the novel starts to make sense to the readers. The use of a limited first person point of view is also common in mystery novels since this certain point of view limits readers at the same pace with the protagonist as he/she attempts to solve the murder. 2. Explain what ideologies...
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...Faulkner. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Summary of the movie Set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, The Lover reveals the intimacies and intricacies of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl (Jane March), from a financially strapped French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man (Tony Leung Ka-Fai). The story is narrated by Jeanne Moreau, portraying a writer looking back on her youth. In 1929, a 15 year old nameless girl is traveling by ferry across the Mekong Delta, returning from a holiday at her family home in the village of Sadec, to her boarding school in Saigon. She attracts the attention of a 32 year old son of a Chinese business magnate, a young man of wealth and heir to a tidy fortune. He strikes up a conversation with the girl; she accepts a ride back to town in his chauffeured limousine. Compelled by the circumstances of her upbringing, this girl, the daughter of a bankrupt, manic-depressive widow, is newly awakened to the impending and all-too-real task of making her way alone in the world. Thus, she becomes his lover, until he bows to the disapproval of his father and breaks off the affair. For her lover, there is no question of the depth and sincerity of his love, but it isn't until much later that the girl acknowledges to herself her true feelings. Duras' real-life Chinese lover was named Lee. The last she heard of him, he became a born again Christian and loved his family very much. He died and was buried...
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