Tim O 'Brien's How To Tell A True War Story'

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

“You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let 's say, and afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer matters, you 've got your answer” (O’Brien 62). In the book The Things They Carried Tim O’ Brien displays throughout his short stories how much war can change you mentally, emotionally, and your sanity.

O’Brien has struggled with coping with horrific war memories like fellow member deaths, poor conditions, and being forced to fight a war that he doesn’t believe in fighting. He is still reflective of certain actions that he had taken that he wishes he could have done different for the better.

1. According to O'Brien, how do you tell a true war story? What does he mean when he says that true war stories are never about war? In what sense is a “true” war story actually true? That is, in O’Brien’s terms, what is the relationship between historical truth and fictional truth?

"The difference between fairy tales and war stories is that fairy tales begin with 'Once upon a time,' while war stories begin with 'Shit, I was there!'" (Lomperis 41). How does one tell a good war story? Is it important to be accurate to the events that took place? Does the reader need to trust the narrator? In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien examines what it takes to tell a good war story. He uses his own experiences in Vietnam in conjunction with his imagination to weave together a series of short stories into a novel.

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.

process is included in his statement, "I was a liberal, for Christ's sake: if they needed

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,

Unquestionable is the fact that Billy feels this way because as he was being thanked for his service he felt upset and admitted that it is sort of weird being honored for the worst day of his life”. Billy wanted to avoid the situation and avoid being asked question that brought him back undesirable memories. Evidently, Billy’s mind “cracked from shock and grief”, shattering his sense of well-being and leaving him numb and vulnerable in a world he considers dangerous. With a focus on what happens during war, let’s take a look at what happens during

The “Baby Boom” era occurred between the years of the late 1950s thru the 19970s and shaped America and its culture into the type of country it is today. It helps to understand these times to prevent history from repeating itself while better understanding how people were feeling during that time. Also, to better understand what was happening during that time by reading the literature that was written during that time period. Through Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, they reflect the cultural, economic, political, and intellectual upheavals the United States was experiencing. These stories affect your way of thinking about these times, especially the war.

While in most war stories people learn about heroism and lessons of bravery, O’Brian focuses on memories and examples of not uplifting and instructive, “He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead almost dainty young man. He had bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely

too-easy resolution to war trauma. For O’Brien and for his readers, telling and listening both

Tim O’Brien, while having actually fought in Vietnam, did not write down entirely factual accounts of his experiences there. Due to this, the novel cannot be considered non-fiction and is instead distributed as a fiction title. This is not to say that the stories contained are not, to some degree, similar to what may have actually occurred to the author or other veterans. Many of the stories in the novel are inspired by actual experiences, but it is fiction.

Tim O’Brien outlines throughout the course of the novel a picture of what a true war story is and the characteristics thereof. First, it must be understood what O’Brien considers a true war story to be before it can be deduced how this coincides with interactions with soldiers in the Vietnam War and other wars as well. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien points out that “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (67). There is a stricken difference between the story-truth and happening-truth in war stories. The happening-truth is usually what is left out in a true war story, as the happening-truth is usually extremely hard to hear or unrelated to the correlated emotions to the story. Conversely, there is the story-truth, which soldiers use to help the reader or listener “feel what [they] felt” (O’Brien 171). Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried “[addresses] the divergence of values – the contradiction between a standard of literary authenticity and the project of moral evaluation” (Wesley 2). This gives a more in depth representation as to what a true war story is and what the novel represents. This journal on The Things They Carried also points out that “by abandoning literary realism, [the novel] comes closer to presenting a polemic vision that insists on the problematic nature of the

One of the effects Tim O’Brien wanted readers to understand was that war was horrific. In the short story “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?,” it says, “Though he was afraid,