Rat And Curt Lemon example essay topic

387 words
In "How to tell a True War Story", Tim O'Brien creates a narrator that tells a war story over and over with little bits and pieces added on every time he tells it. He can never quit finish telling his whole story because he thinks about it too much and doesn't want to remember what he saw that day. The war story took place in Vietnam up in the foggy and moist mountains deep in the jungle. There were two main people involved in the story; Bob Kiley, who everyone called him by the nickname of "Rat", and Curt Lemon.

Curt lemon and Rat were fooling around one day and invented up a game that involved throwing a smoke grenade back and forth at each other. Curt Lemon took a step back and "stepped on a booby-trapped IO 5 round". (554) Rat was devastated and wrote a letter to Curt's sister telling her what a great brother she had. Curt's sister never wrote back to Rat and was mad.

The narrator keeps going back to when Curt and Rat were playing with the smoke grenade and give more detail each time about the setting. They were both in the shadows of the big trees and when Curt "took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped IO 5 round blew him into a tree". (556) After that the narrator and another guy, Norman Bowker, were ordered to climb the tree and throw down his parts from the tree. He remembers bits and pieces of that but most of all remembers when Norman Bowker calls the tree a "Lemon Tree". This story was an interesting story to read challenging follow. It talked about different war stories and would never just completely tell you how the real war story happened.

It would tell you what happened by little bits and pieces and you would have to put them all together for it to make scents. I can actually say that this story had me interested in what the narrator was going to say next. You didn't know if he was going to make some funny comment or was going to give a detailed description of what went on.