Summary Of The Chapter 'How To Tell A True War Story'

If I could go back to any time in the world, I would go back to France in October 1944 on the Western Front. World War Two has always interested me. Being able to see the revolutionary weapons would be incredible. I would also love to take part in such a historic and epic war. War is a horrible event that plays a major part in human development.

In “how to tell a true war story” Tim o Brien tells some stories of war and tries to explain why and how these stories are true. O Brien come up with his own guidelines for what a true war story should contain for it to be true if it contains other things that what he mentions it is not true even if it happened. According to O Brien “a true war story is never moral” (Brien 1), “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue” (Brien 1), does not restrain men from doing the things they have always done” (Brien 1) in addition O Brien continues to unfold the requirements for labeling a story true and he even says “ if you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth” (Brien 2) meaning that a true story could contain some type of obscenity

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

     In “How to Tell a True War Story” O’Brien explores the relationship between the events during a war and the art of telling those events. O’Brien doesn’t come to a conclusion on what is a true war story. He writes that one can’t generalize the story as well. According to O’Brien, war can be anything from love and beauty to the most horrid

From beginning to end, O’Brien manages to use coherence to tie up the whole chapter as a whole. This is accomplished very subtlety as it is not completely evident that this is his ultimate goal. By starting with an objective at the start of each paragraph, he uses the rest of the paragraph to provide an explanation for his point. O’Brien writes, “A true war story is never moral.

As you know I am writing to you from the trenches of the western front in France. The United States of America joined this heinous war in the spring of nineteen hundred seventeen. We joined the fight because of the sinking of the Lusitania and when the German Kiaser sent the note to Mexico to convince them to put themselves against us to assure we will not go to war in Europe. That did not go through because the economic condition of Mexico is not that good enough to fight in a war with the United States.

     According to the author Tim O’Brien, people tend to readily accept the ‘facts’ presented of what happened during a war. People do not consider the existence of fallacies regarding the actual stories of what happens in wars, few consider that the ‘facts’ of an incident often change through people’s words. The film ‘Saving the Private Ryan’ by Steven Spielberg features both facts and seemingness part of the war story. Since it is so difficult to fully describe a war using human language, Spielberg ended up revising his stories to make sense out of it. Spielberg included parts that did not occur or exclude parts that did occur in order to make their stories seem more credible. According

Have you ever been hesitant to share a true story because you suspected that it would appear as a fabricated anecdote to your audience? Well, most of the time we add bunch of things or change a true story to make it sound genuine to our audience. We live in a judgmental and complex world where lying has become a part of our daily lives. Because of this habit, it is hard to differentiate the truth from a fabricated lie. Since I was a child, my parents always talked about battle of Adwa and many events that took place centuries ago. It is always amusing to listen to those stories because it is about heroic act that most of the kings of Ethiopia accomplished. Although I heard different versions of these stories, I always tend to believe my parents’ version. The reason is not simply the credibility of my parents’, but the way it was presented. According to the short story, “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’ Brien, a true war story is hard to accept as true because some of the most agonizing parts are true, while some of the natural parts are not. Tim O’Brien’s narrative shows that a storyteller has the power to shape listeners’ views. We can change our perception because of the story teller, and neglect the fact that we are avoiding the actuality. Therefore by listening to different versions of a story, it will actually help the reader find greater truth of the story.

A true war story is rather difficult, if not impossible, to share when it goes beyond one’s imagination. Regarding such a story, one morally sound aspect about it is that it lacks morality or meaning to it. Extracting facts from a true war story is a daunting task because what seems to happen is what actually occurs. In what is to follow, I will tell one awful true war story.

Throughout Tim O'Brien's, “How to Tell a True War Story”, the concept of truth and how one tells a “true” war story is discussed. Several factors contribute to the “truth” of the stories the soldiers told; the madness of the war, the civilians back home who didn't experience war or understand that it was hell, and the indescribable ways the soldiers felt. O'Brien explains that people willingly accept the facts of what happened during a war but, what they don’t consider is the deception of these facts that change through people’s stories. All of these factors combined caused the soldiers to react to certain situations and tell stories differently. O’Brien’s stories characterize that “truth” isn’t always a straightforward concept; and that it can be revealed in many ways. It can be the narrator’s intention, to provide the truth but the person listening might find a different truth to the story.

The short story that will be discussed, evaluated, and analyzed in this paper is a very emotionally and morally challenging short story to read. Michael Meyer, author of the college text The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature, states that the author of How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien, “was drafted into the Vietnam War and received a Purple Heart” (472). His experiences from the Vietnam War have stayed with him, and he writes about them in this short story. The purpose of this literary analysis is to critically analyze this short story by explaining O’Brien’s writing techniques, by discussing his intended message and how it is displayed, by providing my own reaction,

The author is telling a supposed true war story, yet telling the reader first hand a contradictory opinion on how a true war story should make the listener or reader feel. After one of the multiple descriptions of the story of Curt Lemon, O’Brien iterates on the difficulty of telling a true war story saying that “the angles of vision are skewed” (O’Brien 57). With this statement, O’Brien is saying that even when a war story is told with complete truth, there is still false information. The witness and first-hand account still was not able to capture the moment in its entirety, which leads to assuming some of the story. These comments by O’Brien are intended to help the reader interpret the blurry memories of war through blurred metafiction. On many occasions while reading the story, I was lost and confused on what was going on in the story, especially near the ending of the book. Constantly, the real honesty of O’Brien’s stories were contradicting and that caused me to lose understanding of what the author truly wanted the reader to get out of reading this book. When the author was retelling a story multiple times and each time in a different way, I was unsure of what the real occurrence was. The main gist of the particular story was understood, yet the actual detail and real life emotion in which the story that truly occurred is nearly impossible to grasp. This is unfair to the reader, as this story is intended to be a memoir of the life of O’Brien. It casts intense doubt to his veracity and the true experiences of O’Brien in the Vietnam

The chapter starts with a single line; “This is true” (O’Brien 67). Afterward, O’Brien explains that he had a friend in Vietnam named Rat Kiley. Curt Lemon and Rat were playing catch with a smoke grenade one day when Curt stepped on a landmine and was killed. Rat wrote an emotion-filled, personalized letter to Curt’s sister after he died describing his friendship with her brother. After two months, the men realized Rat would not be receiving a letter in response. O’Brien used this instance as a synonym for war. He goes on in the chapter to write “a true war story is never moral” (O’Brien 68) and “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’” (O’Brien 77). As someone who didn’t agree with the decision to begin the Vietnam War, O’Brien reflects on the meaning of his actions in combat and realizes that men are losing their lives for very little in terms of reward for the United States. Later in the

turning my head again I saw Simon dive to my aid. He did not utter a

The O’Brien tells the story of the generalizations he states the “War is Hell” He said war is nasty, fun, thrilling and drudgery. He goes on to say in the excerpt that war cab make you a man and it can maybe you dead, He states to ‘generalization’ about war is like generalizing about peace. He emphasized a lot of positive and negative things related to war. However in the song one by Metallica. He seems to remembering what it might be like for a soldier. He wants to scream. He relates to war as living in “terrible silence that stops