O'Brien How To Tell A True War Story example essay topic

How to Tell a True War Story - The Irony of Truth in Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" "This is true". (O'Brien, 420) - with this simple statement which also represents a first, three-word introductory paragraph to Tim O'Brien's short story, "How to Tell a True War Story", the author reveals the main problem of what will follow. "Truth" - when looked up in a dictionary, we would probably find definitions similar to sincerity and honesty on the one hand, and correctness, accuracy or reality on the other hand. When looking at these definitions, one can make out two groups of meaning: While sincerity and honesty are very subjective, correctness or accuracy are supposed to be objective by nature.

One can be sincere and still not report the truth, due to the simple fact that one does not know any better. Accuracy, however, is supposed to represent facts, bits and pieces of information that paint a picture of an event, untouched by opinion or attitude. In his short story, O'Brien unravels step by step the irony in the double meaning of truth, implied in this first statement, "This is true", to the reader which is then woven through the entire story. By trying to characterize what constitutes a true war story, but never really achieving this goal, the true irony of his short story is revealed. Even though in some instances giving away his opinion explicitly, the sheer contradiction of honesty and reality becomes even more visible in an implicit way by following O'Brien's explanations throughout the story while he deconstructs his first statement. The incongruity between his first statement and what is actually shown in his examples does not need any explicit statements to drive home his message.

An interesting combination of recalled events and editorial commentary, the story is not set up like a traditional short story. One of the most interesting, and perhaps troubling, aspects of the construction of "How to Tell a True War Story" is O'Brien's choice to create a fictional, first-person narrator who might just as well be the author himself. Because "How to Tell a True War Story" is told from a first-person perspective and O'Brien is an actual Vietnam veteran, a certain authenticity to this story is added. He, as the "expert" of war leads the reader through the story. Since O'Brien has experienced the actual war from a soldier's point of view, he should be able to present the truth about war in a more accurate way than a civilian. The story is set up almost in a didactic manner: O'Brien seemingly gives the reader the components of a "true war story" and explains, using short narratives of his own recollections of the Vietnam War as well as stories told to him by his fellow soldiers, to provide examples that would support his point.

Almost like in a manual for story writing, O'Brien starts out every part of this short story by giving away a supposedly important feature of a "true war story" and then giving a matching example to help the reader visualize his lesson. The reader is presented three different events. Two are told by the narrator himself. It describes his friend's death. Curt Lemon steps on a booby trap and is torn to pieces by the detonation. Even though this event is told three times in three different manners, it is always the same event with a different perspective.

The second story is told by his friend Mitch Sanders. He tells the story of six soldiers on a listening post. They are supposed to detect enemy movement in the jungle and report on that. Instead of encountering Vietnamese soldiers in the wilderness of the jungle, they seem to hear voices of a classical concert out in the distance. A third story again is told by the narrator himself. He tells the story of four soldiers on a mission when attacked.

However, as the reader is to realize soon, by having his fictional characters tell stories and then recant the truth of those stories, O'Brien certainly calls into question the possibility of ever telling a true war story. The result of this technique is that the story is both fragmentary and cohesive: the stories within the larger framework are fragments held together by a narrative voice determined to "get the facts right" and give a complete and comprehensible description of a "true war story". The narrator's instructions deal with several problems about the "truth" that make his first statement seem so ironic. How does the narrator's limited perspective define the truth? Do we always see all there is or do we as spectators to an event just put together pieces of information ourselves?

And how does the narrator's intention influence the content of a story? And finally, how does the audience's expectation direct the way a story is received and understood? Seemingly answering these questions, O'Brien plays with our own limitations in the perception of what is going on around us. Considering all these factors, it sounds ironic to claim that something is the absolute truth. At the end of the story, however, the author presents a kind of resolution to the reader to help him or her to answer all those questions. O'Brien calls into question whether it really matters that a story is told with all its details because not the details but the message of the story might be important.

The narrator explains that what seems to be true is often the realest truth there is. After an event has occurred, we often can reconstruct it only through the stories told by others. Therefore the truth becomes the story because we can no have an objective view on it. A "surreal seeming ness" represents "in fact the hard and exact truth as it seemed" (O'Brien, 422). From his point of view, in a true war story it is difficult to separate the truth from what just seemed to happen. When Curt Lemon dies, Tim sees it all happen in a big confused jumble, and that is the truth of what happened.

As the narrator tells us: When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot (O'Brien, 422). There are no details to sort through; it is the confusion that is true. Mitchell Sanders makes up details of his story to make Tim feel as if he were there; that is a kind of truth-telling. Yet, is it the real truth?

The narrator claims it, to him, "It's all exactly true" (O'Brien, 422). Truth is what seems. This is one of the pieces of advice he gives the reader about writing a true story. The narrator of a story can be honest by telling everything the way he experienced it from his individual point of view. However, this does not have to be necessarily the truth because the narrator of that story might have missed out on important details. Another component of a true war story is, as the narrator tells us, the fact that it is not supposed to contain any kind of moral.

The narrator tells the reader that a true war story cannot have any moral or meaning behind it: "If a story is moral, do not believe it" (O'Brien, 421). If it makes you feel good at the end, it is not true. Only stories that reveal something obscene or evil about the people involved are true war stories, because there is no goodness in war. The fighting can be beautiful, but only in a cruel way. This statement on his search for "truth" at first seems fairly comprehensible. A war story is not to "instruct, nor encourage virtue" (421), but to recall the plain string of events without making it seem prettier or more pleasant than it is.

It is supposed to be objective and not "diluted" by personal feelings and ideologies. Mitchell Sanders believes that a story has some kind of integrity -- there's a right and a wrong way to tell it. "Never add your own comments" (O'Brien, 425), he says. It ruins the flow of the story. But Sanders wants the story to be believed, so he cannot just stick to the facts of what happened.

In order to make the story of the six soldiers on the listening post believable, he has to add to it, either in imaginary details or in sideline commentary. The truth is compromised for the narrator's intention: To Rat Kiley, the details are not important, because to him the truth lies deeper than a descriptive story could show. The fact that the soldiers on the listening post hear voices in the jungle, the sounds of civilization is to show that Vietnamese people are more than "uncivilized gooks" (O'Brien, 426) - as many American soldiers might have seen them. The story Kiley tells is just to illustrate his point, to make it easier to grasp.

The narrator explains that what is made up is often truer than what actually happened, because it puts a face on faceless events and people. It gives specificity to general events. A true war story does not generalize because "To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true" (O'Brien, 427). This is perhaps the essence of what O'Brien calls 'story-truth' -- not facts, but real feelings and impressions make a story true and believable.

There is no way to decide what is the most important part of the truth. When Rat Kiley writes to Lemon's sister about her brother's death, the reader is tempted to believe that the point of O'Brien to tell this story is to point out the sad reality of soldiers dying in combat. But here again, O'Brien reveals his sense for irony; not the fact that Lemon died is sad, but the fact that his sister never answers Kiley's sad letter. O'Brien tells the reader that he has told the story of Lemon's death over and over to so many people.

And every time he is finished with his story, an elderly woman comes up to him and tells him to put it all behind him. "You dumb c ooze", the narrator thinks, "she was not listening" (O'Brien, 429). His story is "about love and memory. [... ] It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen" (O'Brien, 429). The truth can be revealed in many ways.

It can be the narrator's intention, but the person listening might see a different truth to the story. The subtle irony of him trying to solve the problem of truth rationally develops in front of the reader the more the story progresses, until one is left with nothing more than the conclusion that truth can be a very tricky term. It cannot be defined. No matter how rational the author's approach to this problem might be - in the end, he "won't get it right" because it is impossible.

The reader can feel the irony presented by O'Brien - the harder the characters of his story try to approach truth, the more entangled they find themselves in their subjective views. And obviously, this is the exact same conclusion that the author has come to. "Is it true? - The answer matters", (O'Brien, 428), we are told.

In the end, the objective truth does not seem to matter because it seems impossible to reconstruct an event from this objective point of view. Maybe the point of telling stories is not trying to recreate the reality of a past event, but it is the message that matters because that might be in the end the only thing that does not necessarily depend on single details of the story, but on the overall picture of an event. That is why to O'Brien another important component of a war story is the fact that a war story will never pin down the definite truth and that is why a true war story "never seems to end" (O'Brien, 425). O'Brien moves the reader from the short and simple statement "This is the truth" to the conclusion that, "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story noting much is ever very true" (O'Brien, 428).

These two statements frame the entire irony of the story, from its beginning to its end. Almost like the popular saying "A wise man admits that he knows nothing". Works Cite dO " Brien, Tim. "How To Tell a True War Story". The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed.

Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2003. p. 420-429.