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Analysis Of How To Tell A True War Story, By Tim O Brien

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In his excerpt “How to Tell a True War Story”, from his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien explains that a true war story is not moral, does not stop the things that have always happened, is obscene, is surreal, is detailed, does not depend on exact truth, and leaves people with nothing much to say besides “Oh.” Based on Tim O’Brien’s depiction of a “true war story”, Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five is an acutely authentic story of war. Of the many points Tim O’Brien makes about true war stories, one of them touches on morality. O’Brien states that “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.” This reveals …show more content…

He writes, “Happeningness is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” Vonnegut’s stories of Tralfamadore never really happened, but they reveal more truth than some events that actually happened. Vonnegut writes about the Tralfamadorians interest in Charles Darwin, stating, “The Earthling figure who is most engaging to the Tralfamadorian mind… is Charles Darwin--who taught that those who die are meant to die, that corpses are improvements” (pg 210). Tralfamadorians do not exist, of course, but their teachings and beliefs help Vonnegut cope with the war. If everyone is supposed to die at some point, then all those lives taken during the war were meant to be taken. This is a truth that veterans of the war, and any human being, really, can latch onto in order to process something that does not make sense. Vonnegut does not care to write a war story that is technically true, one that tells every detail as it happened. He tells the truth how it is to him, and that is how O’Brien says a true war story is. Whether it happened or not is besides the

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