When he takes the readers into the past it is more than just a flashback. O’Brien makes it feel real, the past becomes the present. That is what creates depth. He is trying tell a war story, the best way to tell a story is to put it before the reader's eyes, like watching a movie. He skips all over in regards to time to show that there is no moral, only truth and make-believe or all truth if he wants to believe it's true. Though jumbled all over, the book harmonizes together.
O’Brien uses repetition as his main narrative technique. When he wants to emphasis certain events within each chapter he frequently repeats the main event. Repetition is important …show more content…
It makes the story ambiguous to an extent, and allows for deeper interpretation. “She had long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream. Very friendly, too.”(93). Mary Anne symbolized how clean and pure the soldiers were prior to the war. That quote came shortly after the baby buffalo event. Reminding the readers that the soldiers were once sane was a use of ironic timing because he wrote one thing but actually meant something else and the symbols showed that.
Tim O’Brien used future in the past during the war. Henry Dobbins would think about his girlfriend and what they would do after the war and Mark Fossie would be with Mary Anne Bell. The future was a way to past time and relieve stress. It gave the soldier’s hope, if you believed you had a future you believed you were going to make it out of Nam alive and normal. The author explained the death of a character but still went back and shared his future. The dramatic irony the readers felt helped progress the immoral aspect of the story.
At Nam time stood still, it is nothing more than a memory O’Brien wrote about Bowker’s knowance of literal time. This display of time revealed how soldiers do not come back from war with brag able traits. His broken writing style mimicked how the soldiers were