Analysis Of O ' Brien 's '

Junior Kyle O’Brien is one of the star players on the Malden High School Boys Cross Country team. O’Brien started participating in Cross Country during his freshman year and began running as a junior varsity runner, but also ran a two-mile race as varsity.

As soon as the front cover is opened, the book makes itself clear: it is ‘a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien’. However, things start to get strange once the book actually begins. O’Brien writes the book as a memoir, inserting himself as a soldier in the war. When one reads a book and sees the author as one of the main characters, they are quick to assume that the story is based on true life. In fact, O’Brien

The fictional novel, In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien, conveys the presence human frailty and human nature. The main character, John Wade is troubled and devastated when his beloved wife, Kathy Wade goes missing during their stay at a cottage near a grand lake that is located in the woods. The author proposes evidence and hypothesis to leave the reader guessing about the fate of Kathy. Prior to that, John’s political career ends after information about his dark past comes to light, leaving Kathy and John both emotionally depressed. However, they keep their emotions a secret and feign happiness. The author states evidence to express the mental and physical challenges along with the difficulties John had to face which impacts him and

Through telling and retelling these people’s stories O’Brien (and any character doing the storytelling) is preserving and extending the people’s lives. Most of the stories and characters in this novel are made up; this much O’Brien admits to. Only through exaggerating and inventing stories, O’Brien argues, can the true sentiments of the stories and the people in them be conveyed. O’Brien admits that he “invented incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” what it was like to go through the war (O’Brien, 107). Only through these inventions can we truly begin to understand who the characters are and how they were affected by the events that took place in the

This is especially evident in the stories of O’Brien’s draft and his first killing, Bob Kiley and Curt Lemon’s friendship and his unanswered letter, as well as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s love life. A true war story encompasses the severity and consequences that come along with war: I concur with the author’s outlook on what an authentic war story is defined to be. O’Brien’s objective is to reveal “those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” and how the truth to a war story could never be guaranteed and that the truth is “all relative” (O’Brien 35) because in the end “you can’t even tell a true war story”(O’Brien

In The Things They Carried, O’Brien shows the effects that war can have on a person by showing different results on multiple characters. It is very clear that one main theme expressed throughout the novel is the psychological effects that resulted from the hardships that they endured while in Vietnam. This can be inferred by the changes that each character encounters after their experiences while at war. War is an experience that changes people drastically.

Our author Tim o’brien grew up in southern Minnesota. As a child Tim spent a lot of his time practicing magic tricks and not ever did he believe in war. He spent his years in college attending peace vigils, wanted nothing to do with war. Not long after he had graduated he was already accepted to and was anticipating on going to a PH.D program at Harvard when he received his draft notice for war. It was said to be that he only joined because he was guilty and felt like he’d disappoint his parents if he didn’t.

O’Brien tells a story of how he came to make the decision to enter the war after receiving his draft card. He had just graduated and was planning on attending Harvard for graduate school. He was torn with the idea of running to Canada to avoid the war (which he did not believe in). He drove a car all the way to the Canadian border and was rowed in a boat to the border, but could not bring himself to jump in to enter Canada. He returned, drove home and enter the

O’Brien writes, “I would go to the war-I would kill and maybe die-because I was embarrassed not to… I was coward. I went to war.” I wasn’t surprised to hear him say this because I can understand the fear that was going through his mind. I feel like he is choosing personal shame over public shame, which makes him a coward. However, there is an irony within the situation because of how much courage it takes to even partake in the war. Yet, O’Brien still feels that he was a coward for not standing up and saying no. O’Brien views his act in Vietnam as being an act of cowardice. I don’t necessarily agree with him because it does take courage to go risk your life for others. On the contrary, O’Brien’s acts can be viewed as being cowardice because

As a liberal arts student, I find that my version of reality is often challenged. This sounds like a frightening statement, and it is; however, this is the fate of an avid learner. Every sensation and perception one experiences changes our perspective; in other words, alters our reality. This distortion of reality is taken to the extreme in times of war, as O’Brien is faced with atrocities associated with war, death in particular. As O’Brien often changes perspectives between chapters, is it apparent that his description of death changes as he is progressively exposed to new and strange side of human nature that has been previously unknown to him.

This adds to the untrustworthiness of the unreliable narrator as the accuracy of these events, as told by John Dowell, come into question. Was Dowell a fool-saint character, or was he playing the fool to manipulate and contrive the story? His omniscient claims regarding other characters’ emotional states and thought processes during events he was not present for are suspicious in their

The writer Flannery O’Connor has presented very strange picture of a dysfunctional family on a family vacation which is shown to be destroyed just because of by three escaped convicts. The story reaches its climax at the time when the grandmother, very important to the story, who is very near to her death is offered the gift of grace and she willfully accepts that gift. Many circumstances that eventually lead to that climax in the story are very interesting. The story is an exact explanation of the words in the title. It shows a very hard and uncompromised statement, this statement encompasses that humans are manipulated by other fellow humans. There is another concept regarding this story which shows that it is a kind of black comedy. There are many views regarding the characters in the story and their own roles. The characters are getting manipulated which can be also analyzed as a supreme power playing with humans in a very mysterious way against their will. All of these forces can be potentially justified as a potential explanation of what ultimately happens to the family.

The Reading passage have several doubts about the accuracy of the memoir written by the

Julian’s mother as well as Julian himself both have their own views of the imaginary reality that they would care to believe as their actual reality; his mother tries to keep up her perception that white people still have this tremendous power over blacks while Julian battles to fight the influence she has had on how he perceives his reality. O’Connor’s story takes place around the civil rights movement as alluded by the narrator when he mentions that, “She would not ride the buses by herself at night since they had been integrated” (818). With that in mind the concept of power is fleshed out in one symbolic detail, a penny. That one coin embodies the idea that black people still need and rely on whites to get anywhere in life; she believes that

Sean O'Casey wrote this quote. To me it means that there is no real right or wrong answer in life. Life is a series of decisions; decisions we think are right at that exact moment. Decisions that usually are wrong in the entirety of things. Life is about moments we mess up, trip, and stumble through to get to where we think we want to be. Some of us are so concerned with the end result we completely forget to step back and truly understand these so called mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has moments they wish to fast forward or erase entirely it is those events though, that help us figure out what we want. So in a way those mistakes can really be the best thing to ever happen to you.