Tim O’brien’s How To Tell a War Story speaks of the aftermath of the atrocities that the writer and his friends experienced. The story highlighted that the Veterans were in a state of such distress due to their tendency to prioritize their military obligations before their own emotional wellness. This turns into a forced habit to oppress all their sorrows. In the article “The Nature of Stress”, Selye, a Stress expert, describes his definition of stress and its’ factors, one of the elements of stress, Selye expressed was the different reactions one has to a stressful situation and how each individual’s expression of stress may be different to the others, this was highly emphasized in the story. While in “Using Stress Appraisal and Coping theories
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Therefore, it is safe to correlate this to the events in “How To Tell A War Story” as all the evidence presented above comes to show the fact that their incapability of using their emotions flexibly created this distress, otherwise Rat Kiley would not have tortured the water buffalo, the narrator would not still have PTSD to this day. In the story, the narrator expressed “Norman Bowker and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me, but what wakes me up twenty years later is Norman Bowker singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.” The event that he so vividly described, did not elaborate on his own reaction to having to preform such a gruesome and horrific task. He spoke of the aftermath, his PTSD still being triggered after twenty years of the event’s occurrence. However he never brought up his own reaction to the task they had to commit, he only spoke of Norman’s reaction. Additionally, if they were capable of expressing their emotions in a flexible manner, the soldiers would not have …show more content…
Therefore, an event, irrespective of its importance may or may not be perceived as stressful or harmful by an individual ( Regehr & Bober 2005).” This theory was extremely interesting to correlate to the events in “How To Tell A War Story”, as based on the theory of this essay, it is easy to determine that the Appraisal theory would be proven to be unsuccessful on the soldiers. Since the this theory’s success would rely on the soldiers’ willingness to express their interpretation of what occurred while they were in combat. Another reason as to why I found this quite interesting was the fact that the narrator did express the way he interpreted the situation. “Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half-step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could
Therefore, it is safe to correlate this to the events in “How To Tell A War Story” as all the evidence presented above comes to show the fact that their incapability of using their emotions flexibly created this distress, otherwise Rat Kiley would not have tortured the water buffalo, the narrator would not still have PTSD to this day. In the story, the narrator expressed “Norman Bowker and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me, but what wakes me up twenty years later is Norman Bowker singing “Lemon Tree” as we threw down the parts.” The event that he so vividly described, did not elaborate on his own reaction to having to preform such a gruesome and horrific task. He spoke of the aftermath, his PTSD still being triggered after twenty years of the event’s occurrence. However he never brought up his own reaction to the task they had to commit, he only spoke of Norman’s reaction. Additionally, if they were capable of expressing their emotions in a flexible manner, the soldiers would not have …show more content…
Therefore, an event, irrespective of its importance may or may not be perceived as stressful or harmful by an individual ( Regehr & Bober 2005).” This theory was extremely interesting to correlate to the events in “How To Tell A War Story”, as based on the theory of this essay, it is easy to determine that the Appraisal theory would be proven to be unsuccessful on the soldiers. Since the this theory’s success would rely on the soldiers’ willingness to express their interpretation of what occurred while they were in combat. Another reason as to why I found this quite interesting was the fact that the narrator did express the way he interpreted the situation. “Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half-step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could