Pros And Cons Of Rewriting A Memory

War changes the lives of each and every soldier who participates. It continues to change the way they experience events and the way their perception of the simplest things. Many veterans do not realize what truly happened until much later in life, if at all. Many live in denial of the truth, consciously or subconsciously, and many continuously remember their darkest moments. This is the case in “Salem”, written by Robert Olen Butler. The short story is about a man, late in life, recalling a past event from the Vietnam War. He remembers a man, alone in a clearing, whose life he ended. He starts to understand his actions and their true outcomes. The author uses symbolism, setting, and character to enhance the idea that one should always be aware of how his/her actions affect others.

Throughout the book, O’Brien repeatedly states his struggles in telling “a true war story.” One of the obstacle he faces in telling “a true war story” is the readers’ misconception that “truth” must be an event and not an emotion. To begin, O’Brien claims “A true war story is never moral… If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted… then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie… you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (68-69) and “All of us… like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth” (38). In these two statements, O’Brien has shown us that people want not a

Thus, O’Brien wants the readers to understand that it is not the events that happened, but the feelings these men felt, and emphasize this by repeating it multiple times; then described that it is this way because since the soldiers are in the war they lose the sense of what is real and unreal. Therefore, O’Brien does this so his audience understand that there is more to the story than just words. As well as to make his audience think deeper in a way that when he is using metaphors saying “war is hell” war is not actually hell, but the events that occurred, people dying, being isolated, feeling shame because they acted unreasonable, made these men feel like they were actually in hell. Therefore, he successfully persuades the audience that the war stories are true and untrue by reinforcing his message at the end, and leave the reader with a final thought which is his whole point in this

Fitzgerald implements a first party narrative through Nick Caraway’s recollection of the events of the plot in order to effectively demonstrate the scarring, yet beneficial, effects of memories on the current mindset of individuals. The story is of Nick’s past, whose memories are

Memory is defined as “The faculty of the mind by which it retains the knowledge of previous thoughts, impressions, or events.” Memories are units of information that have impacted one’s life and are stored in the brain for years. In some cases, dramatic events may not let the brain register every single detail about a situation. This is much like Anton’s case of the winter of 1945 of the novel The Assault by Harry Mulisch. The events of that winter affected him like no other would. The loss of his mother, father and brother and the burning of his house left an impact on him but the events were so grave his brain did not allow him to remember the smaller

Remembrance; the mental impression on the brain from a certain event. Each soldier in the book, The Things They Carried, experiences some sort of remembrance whether it be saddening or enlightening. Remembrance is consistently perceived as the ability our brains have to go back and revisit moments in time which either disturb us, or give to us a feeling of pure happiness. Its mere sound provokes thought along with curiosity. Generally, when we are alone, surrounded by a nonchalant atmosphere, our brain swirls with thoughts, taking us back to significant moments in our lives. These moments are never forgotten, they are always there for some sort of reason. By means of these memories we can continue to learn from our mistakes and better our lifestyle.

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.

This level of rich memory relates the reader to the experience, making it easier for that person to remember the events being explained. As once said by George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." With all the people who endured this first hand gone, it is a rare and wondrous thing to behold an entire story from beginning to end by someone who lived it first hand.

However, as the reader is to realize soon, by having his fictional characters tell stories and then recant the truth of those stories, O’Brien certainly calls into question the possibility of ever telling a true war story. The result of

The question asks, “Memories only last a few years and then they’re not very important anymore.” That is completely false, that’s why everyone wants to go on many huge trips and do many things with friends and families to make lifelong memories that nobody will forget. You most likely will never forget about the horrific things that have happened in your life though mostly, which O’Brien remembers them all. O’Brien said that on page 34 and explains, “In a way, I guess, she’s right: I should forget. But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.” (O’Brien 34). His daughter Kathleen tells him it’s an obsession to write stories and O’Brien should not think about what happened while he was at war, but that made him a completely different man. He was just some regular teenager and says he was “politically naive”, then that made him into someone who appreciated everything and changed his personality forever and also his political stances. Another example that had been shown on page 36, O’Brien had said, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.” (O’Brien 36). O’Brien was talking about his memories from the war that were little and you do not really know the end of the story. When it was such a small memory, he always thinks about the ending piece, he never can get that little piece, and that is what had made him think of

Farrell argues, “Merely telling one’s story of trauma, however is not enough to begin the healing process” (186). Flashbacks are more than a memory, even if one tells others their flashbacks, one still would not understand the meaning or the significance of the intrusive memory. According to Caruth, “The flashbacks or traumatic reenactment conveys , that is both the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility” (Caruth 153). In order for one to understand and heal from their trauma, one

F. Scott Fitzgerald understands that memory is a double-edged sword, and he illustrates this thought in two of his short stories, Babylon Revisited and Winter Dreams. In his story Babylon Revisited, the protagonist, Charles Wales, is tormented by memories of his past. His wife is dead, and his old friends won’t stop interfering in his life. His sister-in-law is basing her current ideas of him on the fact that he was an irresponsible person in the past, and it hurts his life greatly. Winter Dreams takes a slightly different approach. In this tale, the memories of the protagonist, Dexter Green, start off as pleasant but are later warped by new information. With these two works, Fitzgerald describes the problems that memories can cause in

The story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is an enormously detailed fictional account of a wartime scenario in which jimmy Cross (the story’s main character) grows as a person, and the emotional and physical baggage of wartime are brought to light. The most obvious and prominent feature of O’Brien’s writing is a repetition of detail. O’brien also passively analyzes the effects of wartime on the underdeveloped psyche by giving the reader close up insight into common tribulations of war, but not in a necessarily expositorial sense.. He takes us into the minds of mere kids as they cope with the unbelievable and under-talked-about effects or rationalizing

Memory has no physical form, yet it can make us feel physical pain depending on what the memory consists of. The main Characters, Sethe and Paul D, have memories of being forced to wear iron bits, watch their loved ones be killed, and have something as intimate as their breast milk be stolen from them. These are not the kind of memories that Sethe or Paul D would like to rememeber. Rather These are the kinds of memories that-- they and anyone in their situation--would rather forget.

One cannot of course deny the important role memories have to play in framing or reframing the psyche of an individual, par when they have undergone a harrowing experience such as ‘cultural displacement, factional uprooting, secession claims, and ethnic refugees.’ The clarity with which the characters and the story tellers seem to get in and out of the realms of rational arguments about memory and irrational theories concerning the nostalgia is what makes Amitav Ghosh an author who narrates the tales of experience and not just of plots and a storyline .