Summary Of Tim O 'Brien's Novel The Things They Carried'

Throughout the chapter of “How To Tell A True War Story” the reader is conflicted due to the author’s writing style. Through O’Brien’s writing in the book, the reader is left to ponder between what the author says is true vs what the actual truth is. He writes, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes it own happening and has to be told that way,” (O’Brien 71). Tim O'Brien generally tells the reader that in war stories it is difficult to split apart the truth and what the truth seemed like. Therefore, the stories then become what may have seemed to happen because the truth gets mixed in. At the end of the chapter O’Brien says, “All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up

O’Brien’s unification of fact and fiction is to illustrate the idea in which the real accuracy of a war story is less significant than storytelling. The subjective truth about what the war meant and what it did to change the soldiers is more meaningful than the technical details of the

It is a story about the soldiers and their experiences and emotions that are brought

Within this chapter O’Brien repeatedly reuses the phrase “A true war story” to create emphasis once again. This chapter shows how storytelling can alter an actual experience; depending on how you tell the story. Each story O’Brien tells within this chapter first has a statement then has a story and then another statement to finish. According to O’Brien, true war stories do not generalize, they do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. O’Brien then goes into an actual story about Curt Lemon and his death.

“ How To Tell a True War Story” By O’Brien is a complex story that scrutinizes the complex correlation that exist between war experience and the way stories are being told. Through anecdotes, O’Brien substantiates that a writer contains the ability to form its readers beliefs and viewpoint. Finding a meaning for O’Brien’s story was practically easy because through his anecdotes I was able to openly examine what O’Brien was

Historian Jacob Bronowski concluded that “War is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft.” In the book The Things they Carried, Tim O’brien portrays stories of his own time at the Vietnam War and the stories of his platoon members. During their time in Vietnam, the men of the Alpha Company must manage with the loss of their friends and guilt from killing and witnessing others die. There are three stories of theft and loss among the platoon members. The stories of Jimmy Cross, Tim O’brien, and Kiowa.

In the class discuss there were multiple connections and perspectives of the war. They spoke about how like in the world we all have decisions to make and to see the impact you leave with whatever you do. Also, there was couple of symbolism thrown in the discussion, the symbol of the self harm happening with the soldiers. One soldier broke his own noise and another one wanted to take a perfectly working tooth out. Additionally, one thought is that the soldiers are trying to find a balance with all the war going on, wanting peace with violence all around them. The style of O’Brien in a chapter was repetitive and alliterate with his storytelling. He kept speaking about the story of the war and it was a way to explains how he feels. Moreover,

In the chapter entitled “How to Tell a True War Story,” the narrator, Tim O’Brien, lists various ways in which one can tell a “true” war story. He describes, in one instance, that one can “tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end” (72). This definition stood out to me the most as I thought that it related best to ideas O’Brien had brought up in earlier chapters. The notion that war stories appear endless is one that was also touched upon when O’brien explained: “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (67). Perhaps O’Brien relates the idea that once a story has replaced a memory, the story becomes a part of oneself, and thus never seems to end -- or at least

In this essay, I will discuss how Tim O’Brien’s works “The Things They Carried” and “If I Die in a Combat Zone” reveal the individual human stories that are lost in war. In “The Things They Carried” O’Brien reveals the war stories of Alpha Company and shows how human each soldier is. In “If I Die in a Combat Zone” O’Brien tells his story with clarity, little of the dreamlike quality of “Things They Carried” is in this earlier work, which uses more blunt language that doesn’t hold back. In “If I Die” O’Brien reveals his own personal journey through war and what he experienced. O’Brien’s works prove a point that men, humans fight wars, not ideas. Phil Klay’s novel “Redeployment” is another novel that attempts to humanize soldiers in war. “Redeployment” is an anthology series, each chapter attempts to let us in the head of a new character – set in Afghanistan or in the United States – that is struggling with the current troubles of war. With the help of Phil Klay’s novel I will show how O’Brien’s works illustrate and highlight each story that make a war.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” author Tim O’Brien writes about a soldiers patrol invasion into the rural and dangerous jungle areas of Vietnam and partakes in the enemy. This chapter is utilized to teach the reader about the different aspects of reader manipulation and fiction devices to engage the reader in an emotional depth to believe the stories to be true. In this chapter, with the use of his fictional character also named after himself as the narrator, O’Brien narrates that “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, no encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.” This is central to understanding The Things They Carried because wrote in the form of a memoir O’Brien uses fictional devices to challenge the reader to believe each fictional story.

“How to Tell a True War Story” examines the difficult relationship between the war experience and the soldiers’ telling their stories about the war and their experience. O’Brien says sometimes a true war story cannot be believed because some of the most unbearable parts are true, while some of the normal parts are not. Sometimes, he says, a true war story is impossible to tell. O’Brien also speaks of the beauty of the war, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty (O’Brien 347).” Although the war was gruesome he saw some beauty in the war. When the war is over, he uses his ability to tell stories to deal with his guilt and confusion over the atrocities he witnessed

As long as there has been war, those involved have managed to get their story out. This can be a method of coping with choices made or a way to deal with atrocities that have been witnessed. It can also be a means of telling the story of war for those that may have a keen interest in it. Regardless of the reason, a few themes have been a reoccurrence throughout. In ‘A Long Way Gone,’ ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ and ‘Novel without a Name,’ three narrators take the readers through their memories of war and destruction ending in survival and revelation. The common revelation of these stories is one of regret. Each of these books begins with the main character as an innocent, patriotic soldier or civilian and ends in either the loss of innocence and regret of choices only to be compensated with as a dire warning to those that may read it. These books are in fact antiwar stories meant not to detest patriotism or pride for one’s country or way of life, but to detest the conditions that lead to one being so simpleminded to kill another for it. The firebombing of Dresden, the mass execution of innocent civilians in Sierra Leone and a generation of people lost to the gruesome and outlandish way of life of communism and Marxism should be enough to convince anyone. These stories serve as another perspective for the not-so-easily convinced.

Within the novel The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford, narration serves as an imperative framing mechanism for propelling the plot of the story, while also generating the fragmentation necessary for maintaining the unclarity that pervades John’s story. By both subtly positioning the narrator John Dowell as an outsider relative to the other characters, and consequently emphasizing the notion of being outside, Ford facilitates a pointillistic representation of the infidelities that characterize his story. Not only does Ford distance Dowell from the other characters in his narrative, but he also prompts the reader to reject John as an omnipotent, reliable source, thereby provoking the former to rely on interpretation as the primary means for finding resolution. Emphasizing several factors that distinguish John from the other characters, such as his nationality, his inclusion in and knowledge of the infidelitous relationships, his personality type, his future reflective standpoint, and his tendency to infuse his current attitudes and nostalgia into his retelling of this story, Ford employs narration as the essential mechanism for framing the story.

The quest for truth is a time honored search since the beginning of time. Many writers and authors have not only themselves searched for truth but also has caused their readers to search for truth as well. One of the writers was Tim o’Brian in the book the things they carried. Which after reading the book makes us look at the question, what is truth, to what extent did Tim o Brian answer the question but also how did it make us understand the work as a whole.

The narrative world of The Armies provides readers with multiple and diverse meanings to the incident of the anti-war March towards the Pentagon. Multiplicity emerges out of the various perspectives of the same story told by the reporter of The Time and retold by Mailer, the narrator. In the process of the Time reporter’s telling and the narrator’s retelling of the scenes of the March, readers become aware of their involvement in the process of creating the fictional universe of the text. The Reporter of The Time and Mailer, the narrator, alternatively exchange roles as a reporter/narrator and as a reader of the same story. However, in the linguistic mode, The Armies constitutes itself as a quintessential narcissistic text with its “building blocks,” that is, “the very language whose referents serve to construct that imaginative world” (Narcissistic Narrative 29). On the linguistic sphere, Mailer, in The Armies, skillfully reconciles the generic opposites by deliberately giving the subtitle of his work: ‘history as a