War In The Rain Essay

Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried” epitomizes the degradation of morals that war produces. This interpretation is personified in the characters who gradually blur the line dividing right and wrong as the motives for war itself become unclear. The morality of soldiers and the purpose of war are tied also to the truth the soldiers must tell themselves in order to participate in the gruesome and random killing which is falsely justified by the U.S government. The lack of purpose in the Vietnam War permanently altered the soldier’s perspective of how to react to situations and in most cases they turned to violence to express their frustration.

“War is hell,” he says, “but that’s no the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love...war is nasty; war is fun.” (76). Repeatedlyhe describes the manner in which those around him perish, seemingly unable to move on yet insisting that in the repeated telling he walks the road to recovery. O’Brien does not shy away from the graphic and disturbing, but he does not dwell on the macabre for so long that he forgets about the light in life. His ability to seek solace beyond the trauma, his determination to cure himself through storytelling, manifests a hopeful tone that, although never truly sheds itself of depression’s shroud, grows

In the text’s earliest stages, O’Brien feebly muses on the ideas formed from both his pre- and post-college life, demonstrating a socially unacceptable unsureness brought forth from the desire to conform to both ideologies, which consumes him until he reflects on it in the 1980s. Soon after the brief description of O’Brien’s ideas of moral behavior and courage unfold, O’Brien’s novel jumps from his small-town American life to a place where O’Brien first began to develop ideas separate from his parents’ ridged ideals: college. Falling alongside many other students in the ‘60s, O’Brien is exposed to the idea of the war being unfounded and begins to tentatively form his ideas, taking a “stand against the war”. However, he does “nothing radical…just ringing a few doorbells for Gene McCarthy” (O’Brien 173). While aligning with the principles associated with the movement in a tentative manner, O’Brien makes the suggestion that these ideas were a governing principle when dealing with the war’s justification. However, he then echoes the other side’s rhetoric, stating he “could not claim to be opposed to war as a matter of general principle” especially when it was needed to stop a true evil, for then he “would’ve willingly marched off to battle” (O’Brien 175). Through the inclusion of these two contrasting ideas side by side in the novel, one can gather O’Brien seeks

The glorified act of war is often staged in historical literature by idolizing the soldiers who partake in the event. Soldiers are made to seem intrepid, ruthless and muscular, each with a ceaseless desire to fight valiantly for their countries. Timothy Findley and Kurt Vonnegut discard this typical hero archetype in their anti-war novels by portraying the soldiers who fight in the war as the men they are, not as the templates of heroes they are expected to fit, in furtherance of strengthening their anti-war stances. Findley and Vonnegut illustrate their protagonists as a tragic hero and an anti-hero, respectively, in order to juxtapose the atrocities of war with the flawed humanness of man and to challenge the stereotypical image of a

From pages 52 to 54, O’Brien creates a parable that shows the true nature of the fear hidden in us that latches on and doesn’t let go. He exhibits this through the repetition of this fear, the lack of any onlookers to judge, and the rhetorical questions asked. The main idea is that when confronted with a frightful idea such as war, you will feel your truest emotions and they will conflict with your thoughts and even other emotions, and of these fear is strongest.

The Rain Man stars Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. The movie was made in 1988. The movie is about an autistic man named Raymon, who is a idiot savant played by Dustin Hoffman and his fast, talking self absorbed, egocentric brother Charlie Babbitt, who is played by Tom Cruise. A egocentric person is a person with the simple recognition that every living thing views the world from a unique, self-oriented perspective(LIFE: Inherently Egocentric written by James Craig Green http://pw2.netcom.com/~zeno7/ego.html).

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

     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

Released in 1988, writers Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow created a compelling story by introducing many to the world of autism. These two writers brilliantly plotted the dramatic story of a brother's greed developing into love in the 1988 Oscar winning movie Rain Man. Charlie Babbitt, the first main character played by Tom Cruise, is an arrogant, selfish businessman, striving to be wealthy, but his business is failing. The second main character in the film is Raymond Babbitt, played by Dustin Hoffman, who is an autistic savant who lives and is cared for at a mental institution. Charlie receives word that his father, whom he hasn't had contact with in years, has deceased. His father left an inheritance to Charlie and his unknown (or

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

The topic of war is hard to imagine from the perspective of one who hasn't experienced it. Literature makes it accessible for the reader to explore the themes of war. Owen and Remarque both dipcik what war was like for one who has never gone through it. Men in both All Quiet on the Western Front and “Dulce Et Decorum” experience betrayal of youth, horrors of war and feelings of camaraderie.

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.

First, the reader must understand just what makes a good "war story". The protagonist of the novel, Tim O'Brien, gives us his

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.

Before the Rain, filmed on location in the Republic of Macedonia and in London is a trilogy that focuses on the conflict between Muslims and Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. The three chapters of the trilogy are " Words," " Faces" and " Pictures." Director Milcho Manchevski states; " Before the Rain, refers to the feeling of heavy expectation, when the skies are pregnant with the possibility of an outburst, when people are silent, waiting for a tragedy of cleansing"(1).