Tim O Brien Literary Criticism

The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.

O’Brien casts doubt on the veracity of the story to let you experience what the war felt like for him. When him and his fellow soldiers would sit around the campfire telling stories some where obviously made up for entertainment while others actually were authentic. This is how you have to view the book as like you are there with the troops listening to these war stories and deciding for yourself whether or not you believe them. The underlying theme isn’t really the vietnam war in itself, its the act of storytelling.

The main character and story line is based off true stories of the author, Tim O’Brien’s experiences in the Vietnam War. In the present, O’Brien is 68 and is a well rounded individual with a bold personality for a Vietnam veteran.

The distractions of war, misinterpretation of reality and limited control of fate as a result of the human condition appear throughout the Vietnam War at all times. Tim O’Brien, as a narrator describes the struggles of storytelling during and after the war. The constant struggle to determine reality versus personal perception arises in many aspects of his memory. Some factors of recalling events are uncontrollable such as interference of imagination and uncertainty as a result of the human condition. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the telling of story-truth, rather than happening-truth, is necessary, as no replica can be as genuine as the original.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien uses the art of fabricating stories as a coping mechanism. Trying to distinguish the difference between fictional and factual stories is a challenge in this book, but literal truth cannot capture the real violence that the soldiers dealt with in Vietnam, only “story truth” can. He explains, “If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made victim of a very old and terrible lie.” (O’Brien 65). The novel illustrates that storytelling is a way to keep the dead alive, even if it may not be a true story.

The Viet Nam War has been the most reviled conflict in United States history for many reasons, but it has produced some great literature. For some reason the emotion and depredation of war kindle in some people the ability to express themselves in a way that they may not have been able to do otherwise. Movies of the time period are great, but they are not able to elicit, seeing the extremely limited time crunch, the same images and charge that a well-written book can. In writing of this war, Tim O'Brien put himself and his memories in the forefront of the experiences his characters go through, and his writing is better for it. He produced a great work of art not only because he experienced the war first hand, but because he is able to convey the lives around him in such vivid detail. He writes a group of fictional works that have a great deal of truth mixed in with them. This style of writing and certain aspects of the book are the topics of this reflective paper.

Tim O'Brien is confused about the Vietnam War. He is getting drafted into it, but is also protesting it. He gets to boot camp and finds it very difficult to know that he is going off to a country far away from home and fighting a war that he didn't believe was morally right. Before O'Brien gets to Vietnam he visits a military Chaplin about his problem with the war. "O'Brien I am really surprised to hear this. You're a good kid but you are betraying you country when you say these things"(60). This says a lot about O'Brien's views on the Vietnam War. In the reading of the book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Tim O'Brien explains his struggles in boot camp

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,

Tim O’Brien’s use of fictionalized writing in the delivery of “The Things They Carried” was the best writing style possible for a war story. Fiction, as opposed to a more conventional historical account, allows him to paint a more realistic portrayal of soldiers’ actual combat experience during the Vietnam conflict by use of imagery, real life accounts, and third person omniscient point of view.

There are three main thing Tim O’Brien wants us to know about war. The first one thing is how war takes lives. The second one is how war helps us not feel alone. And the last thing is how war consoles us.

During the apex of the Vietnam War Tim O’Brien lived through one of the darkest events in the nation's history. The My Lai Massacre and his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) inspired O’Brien to create such a beautiful novel In the Lake of the Woods. Tim O’Brien achieves the themes of denial and trauma by his masterful use of setting, imagery, and conflict.

Friends are a blessing, especially when friends are found within the madness of war. In the novel, the narrator and author, Tim O’Brien, discusses fictionalized war stories from his experiences in Vietnam. All of the stories are very different. Some deal with death, some deal with love, and some don’t actually deal with the war at all, but they are all connected. They all exemplify, in one way or another, a “true” war story. In one of O’Brien’s stories, he discusses the bond between two men on their journey from enemies, to friends, to loss. The story is appropriately titled, “Friends”. The truth that O’Brien discusses in “Friends” deals with the randomness and chaos of war. War is unexpected, yet the unexpectation of war can lead to serenity

The Vietnam war, a blemish on the face of American history is often dismissed and brushed under the rug. But veterans Daly Walker and Tim O'Brien exhume the war stories they spent decades burying in order to expose the truth about war. Despite the authors differing styles they both utilize symbolism to relate to the audience the tragedies that occurred during the war, and the battles they continue to fight even today.

The truth is personal and relative to the person of interest. One’s truth might be someone else’s lie. Tim O’Brien is a well-known American novelist most famous for writing metafiction stories of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Raised in Austin, Minnesota, and drafted to the War at the age of 22, O’Brien felt the urge of conveying the true feelings of war to a society that was blind to the efforts and struggles of soldiers in the Vietnam War at the time. The book The Things They Carried is a collection of linked short stories inspired by the author’s experience in the War, greatly influencing his career as an author. Through The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien defies the standard definition of truth as means to shed a new light in how stories

His writing’s themes of verisimilitude, real truth vs. story truth, and blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction are all important themes in my story as well. The story I told was not reality; I never drove my dad’s car illegally and had what felt like a near-death experience skidding on black ice. However, in learning to drive over these first few months after I got my driver’s permit, I’ve had experiences and made mistakes that evoked the same stomach-dropping, paralyzing feelings that I talk about in this story. So, in the second sense of the word, the story is true; it expresses the same feelings of vulnerability and fear that I had when learning to drive, just with a different setting and plotline. I discuss these themes of the purpose of storytelling and the different types of story truths throughout my essay in a similar way that O’Brien does in “On the Rainy River” and “How to Tell a True War Story.” I take the language he uses and adapt it to fit my own experiences. Additionally, my use of two different characters, my current self and myself at the time of the story, is similar to how O’Brien uses two narrators in his story: the post-war, older and wiser Tim O’Brien reflects back upon his experiences in the war as Tim O’Brien, the young American soldier in Vietnam. I end the story by discussing the fear of being left behind,