Tim O’Brien always seemed to base his stories off his own experiences in one way or another. More specifically for this essay, we will be talking about “How to Tell a True War Story” in his book “The Things They Carried”. What I am getting at here is that his work never seems to be what we originally think it is. In his story “How to Tell a True War Story”, the point of the story is not about war, it is not a war story. It is a love story; it is a ghost story. It is a story about everything and anything but war. In his work, O’Brien will fool you into thinking the truth is a lie and that a lie is the truth, but I think Susa Farrel described it much better. Perfectly, even. She points out to us that O’Brien puts through his stories “the tenuous
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He is an honest liar who appeals through therapeutic emotion. In other words: he is a damn good writer. In “How to Tell a True War Story”, Tim O’Brien has one character, Rat Kiley, torture and I believe kill a Buffalo to show the mental anguish that not just Kiley, but everyone was going through. The emotional trauma of watching everybody fall apart must sting. Then he speaks of how everything a true yet he deceives us through lies and deceives us through the harshness of the truth by hiding it. Tim O’Brien writes his stories with his characters having a certain complexity to them. But this is all basically a biography, isn’t it? With the truth and lies stretched and condensed to bring readers and to provide a backdrop of mental illness within. The best thing about O’Brien’s writing strategy is that when he pulls through an emotional string, he does so with a deep and reflective way of thinking that implements the lessons and experiences throughout his life. Those memories and his genius way of being true is what made him a writer. His writing is his own sense of mourning that we can feel in great detail ourselves. He is in search of familiarity and that search leads his work into being beautiful. Bottom line is that this would have made a good
He is an honest liar who appeals through therapeutic emotion. In other words: he is a damn good writer. In “How to Tell a True War Story”, Tim O’Brien has one character, Rat Kiley, torture and I believe kill a Buffalo to show the mental anguish that not just Kiley, but everyone was going through. The emotional trauma of watching everybody fall apart must sting. Then he speaks of how everything a true yet he deceives us through lies and deceives us through the harshness of the truth by hiding it. Tim O’Brien writes his stories with his characters having a certain complexity to them. But this is all basically a biography, isn’t it? With the truth and lies stretched and condensed to bring readers and to provide a backdrop of mental illness within. The best thing about O’Brien’s writing strategy is that when he pulls through an emotional string, he does so with a deep and reflective way of thinking that implements the lessons and experiences throughout his life. Those memories and his genius way of being true is what made him a writer. His writing is his own sense of mourning that we can feel in great detail ourselves. He is in search of familiarity and that search leads his work into being beautiful. Bottom line is that this would have made a good