Memory By Morris O Brien Summary

The truth is subjective and how we see the truth impacts the way we understand meaning. Each individual’s memory is a result of what they deem to be true. Sarah Polley questions this concept through her film ‘Stories We Tell’ and brings to light the topic of reliability and subjectivity in terms of memory and the truth.

During the story in “The Man I Killed” O’Brien’s use of such detailed imagery shows the reader that this experience has given O’Brien lots of emotional baggage. With all of this emotional baggage, O’Brien thinks very irrationally by explicitly remembering detail about his experience. O’Brien also tends to keep repeating phrases whenever this occurs. During the story about Norman Bowker in “Speaking of Courage” O’Brien again gives the reader very detailed imagery of the details in the story. The emotional baggage attached to Norman Bowker from his experience with Kiowa’s death causes him to act very irrationally by wading into a lake fully clothed, and later killing himself with no precursor or warning

O’Brien is interacting with his audience by saying the word “you” at the beginning of the passage. When he says, “I want you to feel what I felt” (O'Brien 171), it is making a personal connection between the reader and the author. The goal of these paragraphs is for O’Brien to tell the readers the difference between his happening-truth and story-truth. In a way, it is kind of a confession to his reader. A confession about how he may not be describing exactly what or whom he saw, but instead is saying something to fill the holes in his memories. With the words he is using like faceless grief and then going on to the harsh details about the body, it shows the contrast between both versions of the story. To help show the difference between

"Helping Student Use Textual Source Persuasively" by Maragret Kantz, is a research about the mistakes most of us students make when researching for a paper. "We need a theory-based explanation,one grounded in the findings of the published research on the nature and reasons for our students ' problems with writing persuasive researched papers. To understand how to teach students to write such papers, we also need a better understanding of the demands of synthesis tasks." Like most students like to state the facts given to us by published articles and not finding out the "true" facts of the research. In her research she introduced Shirley. A highly educated sophomore. She comes from an educated family with great reading and writing skills. Shirley wrote a research paper on the Battle of Agincourt. While she did her research and only wrote about the so called fact/truth, she did not receive the academic grade she thought she would since her facts were there. She then presented her concern with her friend Alice. While Shirley defended her sources Alice states "You 're dealing with facts, so there aren 't too many choices. If you want to say something original you either have to talk about the sources or talk about the material..." This would keep Shirley narrative structure of her research paper but also give her an "argument and purpose". There are three causes Kantz states "1) Many students like Shirley misunderstand sources because they read them as stories. 2) Many students

“This is true.” (O’Brien, 420) – with this simple statement which also represents a first, three-word introductory paragraph to Tim O’Brien’s short story, “How to Tell a True War Story”, the author reveals the main problem of what will follow. “Truth” – when looked up in a dictionary, we would probably find definitions similar to sincerity and honesty on the one hand, and correctness, accuracy or reality on the other hand. When looking at these definitions, one can make out two groups of meaning: While sincerity and honesty are very subjective, correctness or accuracy are supposed to be objective by nature. One can be sincere and still not report the truth, due to the simple fact

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

Immigrating to America is a process in which many people all across the world entrust as their one way ticket to a better life. Whether they do so legally or illegally, coming to the United States ensures better opportunities, economically, politically, and so on, to people who would have otherwise been worse off in their countries of origin. Even so, the common understanding of being “better off” can be considered a misconstrued concept when it comes to living in the states. Many families that choose to immigrate to the U.S. fail to realize the cultural hardships that newcomers tend to face once on American soil. Anything from racial discrimination or bias at work, in neighborhoods, at school, etc., can all be challenges that people encounter when making a move to the U.S. Such challenges are described by Richard Rodriquez in his autobiography Hunger of Memory. In this passage, he explains how cultural differences between Mexican and American ways of life have shaped him into the person that he is today. He also chooses to highlights the problems that he faces growing up in a predominately white neighborhood, while attending a predominantly white institution. Much of his writing consists of the cultural differences and pressures he feels to assimilate to Western culture and how this process, in turn, changes him into the person that some may find to be unethical, but nonetheless, someone he is proud of.

O'Brien's writing style is so vivid, the reader frequently finds himself accepting the events and details of this novel as absolute fact. To contrast truth and fiction, the author inserts reminders that the stories are not fact, but are mere representations of human emotion incommunicable as fact.

During this work, O’Brien keeps a casual tone. It sometimes gets more formal and serious, but for the most part, it’s friendly and almost playful. When he is describing the conversations he had with his friends, he looks back on them with happiness. Consequently, when he is describing the death of one of his friends, his tone gets more somber and less playful. For example, the entire chapter of “Stockings” is devoted to describing the soldier Henry Dobbins and an interesting knack of his. “Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck before heading out on an ambush.” This cute, two page chapter provides a bit of relief after the chapter about Mary Anne Belle. It has light connotations and is a generally funny short story. Later in the book, however, he gets more serious when talking about the death of his dear friend Kiowa. He

The reason for this is because it may still leave the same impact on a reader as if it were. Two stories in this book, “The Man I Killed”, and “Speaking of Courage”, are both examples of how the ‘story-truth’ is just as important as the ‘happening-truth’.

Tim O’Brien is a great example of lost innocence. He gives full proof examples on how his innocence was lost, not only in the war, but before the war as well. O’Brien (character) speaks into depth about his loss of innocence in the last chapter of the novel, The Lives of the Dead, here he tells the story of how he experienced love and death at the same time. Linda was O’Brien 's (character) first love, when they were nine years old they fell in love, and the character O’Brien describes that although they were so young he truly felt that this was true love. Linda had cancer, and soon after their first date Linda passed away. She was the first loss of innocence for him, she was the first dead body he had ever seen, and that was extremely hard on him, as it would be for any nine year old, or anyone seeing someone they thought they were deeply in love with. Linda was the reason that O’Brien began writing in the first place. In order to make sense of his life O’Brien began to write to deal with the hard times. He believes that stories can help you deal with the issues in your life, reflecting on the good times, or fantasizing about what you want to actually occur. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the

For example, “ ‘Daddy tell the truth’ Kathleen can say, ‘did you ever kill anybody?’ And I can say, honestly, ‘Of course not.’ Or I can say honestly, ‘Yes’” (172). The pressure from himself as a parent and human being forced him to assume a role as a liar to protect his daughter from the horrors of war and not be seen as a monster. The use of surrealism gives a picture that is created by his imagination with a variety of outcomes and how instead of it all happening in his head and actually occurring in reality. The darkness and horrors that take place “ were times in my life when I couldn’t feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place”(176). Thinking of the past where Kiowa died in the scenes of the war and the war itself caused O’Brien to change his own identity, and over time he does not think the location is remembered the same way when he was in the war. Both are instances where surrealism show how roles of a person with their identities can be forced to change because of the events or experience Tim O’Brien lived

Drawing upon the ability of fiction to preserve life against death, O 'Brien says that, during wartime, that they were able to "[keep] the dead alive with stories" (239). To the living, stories were a way to keep the memory of the dead alive, but to the dead, it was the simple act of remembering that kept them alive: "That 's what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk" (232). This theme of preservation is exemplified by story of Linda, in which O 'Brien uses the power of storytelling and memory to keep people alive: "Stories can save us. I 'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive...They 're all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (225).

Writers that gather information objectively and credible convinces reader's that their claim is plausible and accurate. An essential part of writing effectively and credible is objective writing. Objective writing contains information that balances opposing viewpoints, keeps information bias free, avoid first and second person, and expresses your thoughts. Also, in writing, writers gain credibility by citing sources properly and

The storyteller is able to keep his or her memories fresh and alive through the act of telling stories. At the age of forty-three, Tim O’Brien is still able to remember his childhood friend, Linda, who died when he was nine. “Even now I can see her walking down the aisle of the old State Theater in Worthington, Minnesota. I can see her face in profile beside me, the cheeks softly lighted by coming attractions.” Linda is given the gift of life through death by the power of the story. She not only lives in the mind of Tim O’Brien, but now Linda can live in the mind of anyone of whom he tells the story to. O’Brien’s audience is even graced with the pleasure of imagining what Linda looked like, “There were little crinkles at her eyes, her lips open and gently curving at the corners.” The audience can nearly see Linda, nine years old, standing in a childlike manner before