Tim O’Brien gives many accounts of his encounters while in Vietnam and describes “How to Tell a True War Story” (67). O’Brien touches on a few different factors which describe to the reader what a true war story actually is. I believe that possibly the most important of these is “a true war story . . . never ends” (76). Throughout this whole book, O’Brien flashed back and forth between different stories which seem to be constantly playing in his mind. His daughter even asked him why he kept “writing these war stories” (131). This allows us to know that even a young girl, who was nine years old, was able to realize that her father was constantly writing out these stories that played over and over in his head. Even many years after Kiowa’s death, O’Brien returned with his daughter to Vietnam to “look for sings of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer” (181).
All of these accounts that O’Brien keeps coming back to shows that those who go off to war are going to always be affected by what they have seen and experienced. The point that he tries to make about a war story never ending is truly understood by his constant re-visiting of certain events which he experienced.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990.
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2 comments:
I would agree that a real war story
"never ending" is one of it's most important characteristics. Sometimes this means that the memory is simply played again and again through a veteran's mind but it can also sometimes be literal, like with "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" which has no real ending. It reminds me of something my grandfather, who fought in Italy in World War II, always says; "Old soldiers never die, they simply fade away."
This is a good example of a substantive comment, Brian, in that it adds to the original and carries the ideas of the original forward in a "dialogic" form. Nice!
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