A True War Story

The writings “How to Tell a True War Story”, “Dulce et Decorum est”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” offer contrasting portraits of war. The contrasts between “How to Tell a True War Story”, “Dulce et Decorum est”, and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” can clearly be outlined through their acknowledgement of the most prevalent, unavoidable element of war, death. “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien, address death as a matter of fact, consequence of war. Though, O’Brien is obviously distressed at the atrocities that take place, he neither forthrightly condemns nor praises the act of war. In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the moral is that truth is relative. O’Brien outlines the various ways a single story can take shape. In O’Brien’s story, truth …show more content…
“How to Tell a True War Story” promotes a hasty, disconnected, and at times surreal mood that leaves readers perplexed. It seems that O’Brien frames a story in such a haphazard fashion as to emulate the Vietnamese battlefield. Tim O’Brien creates a gruesome war atmosphere, in a booby-trapped Vietnamese jungle where men are killed in seconds due to camouflaged traps and the killers do not have the moral affliction of a visual consequence.“Dulce et Decorum est” by Wilfred Owen has a very bleak mood. The poem sets readers in a bloody battlefield in the First World War. Wilfred Owen paints a disturbing scene of mangled, bloody bodies scattered throughout the landscape as soldiers, who are barely alive themselves, weave through the horror. Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Dulce et Decorum est”, gives readers a glimpse of the hopeless and desolate mood that enveloped the battlefield during the First World War. On the other hand, Tennyson outlines a battlefield that has casualties, but is ultimately portrays war in a glamorized fashion. In Tennyson’s work, the atmosphere is built on a battlefield. Tennyson does not reflect on the horrors of war, rather the task of the six