How to Tell a True War Story from The Things They Carried In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly
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Burner ENWR-106 How to Tell a True War Story 26 February, 2013 If you don’t know how to analyze writing and don’t understand metaphoric speaking then this is not a story for you. O’Brien constantly goes against every Americans thoughts of a war story; he tells the reader that they’re all fake. O’Brien believes war stories don’t actually have to do with people do with heroic things, because every solider is a hero. The average person who was not in combat would not get a true war story because no
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Brianne ENGL 1126 Summary of How to Tell a True War Story How to Tell a True War Story is written by Tim O’Brien. It is set in Vietnam between the years of nineteen fifty-four and nineteen seventy-five. In this section, the story starts out by talking about a man named Rat Kiley. Kiley is writing a letter to a friend’s sister telling her how good of a man he really was. He also writes about different stories that happened and how he was the first to volunteer for things, just to emphasize the
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In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the message that the story creates is that it really isn’t about war. What O’Brien is trying to say it that it never really is in most of the stories that pertain to war, if you think about it. For instance, on page 496, in this story he claims “it wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. It was a ghost story”. He creates this message simply by describing in detail the emotional impact losing your friends can have on a person. When you read or listen to this story
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Analyses How to Tell a True War Story In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien varies from a straight forward approach because of the horrifying contents of war. Instead, his approach is one of repetition, where he retells the death of Curt Lemon, but with different versions. He adopts this structure to make it more tolerable to his audience, express that true war stories never seem to have an end, and demonstrate how truths become contradictory. True war stories by nature are
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for telling his story accurately and well. Not because it is true, but because it is his commitment as a writer, and because he is the only one who can tell his story. In How to Tell a True War Story, O'Brien discusses many horrific events that took place during his time fighting in Vietnam. As he tries to recall stories from the war, he very heavily relies on imagery to convince the reader, as well as himself, that the story he is telling is completely true. Many events in this story are described
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O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” starts with the brief tongue-in-cheek statement, “this is true.” While most authors seek to build credibility with their reader, O’Brien actively undermines his own trustworthiness in order to convey the skepticism with which he believes audiences should treat all ‘true’ war stories. His most effective strategy for doing so is the interweaving of a potentially fictitious narrative within a formal essay, further developing “How to Tell a True War Story’s” message
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it in the way you have. Events affect people differently and without stories it would not be possible to even try and comprehend the pain of others. How a story is told changes the emotional response of the audience and with that their understanding of the events. Tim O’Brien explores the necessity of ambiguity between fact and fiction in order to create a visceral response to war in his short story “How To Tell A True War Story” which is a chapter in the novel The Things They Carried. O’Brien is
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Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” centers on the principle that a reader cannot always trust the narrator of a story to tell the truth. The reader can listen, but must never cease to analyze in order to decipher the truth in each story. In Tim O’Brien’s short story, his narrator is naturally accepted and assumed to be the author of the story. Through this narrator, a story of personal Vietnam War experiences unfolds. Because this appears to be true stories told by O’Brien, the reader
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War Stories Earnest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien both draw from personal experiences in war to write “A Soldiers Home” and “How to Tell a True War Story”. The character Krebs in “Soldiers Home” and the narrator in “How to Tell a True War Story” both display the psychological and emotional tolls that war takes on those who have experienced it. Both of these stories give the reader a view of the experience of war from a soldier’s perspective. While Hemingway focuses the emotional apathy of Krebs, O'Brien's
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