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How Does Tim O Brien Tell A True War Story?

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Tim O’Brien, born in Austin, Minnesota, grew up with a common childhood. At 7 years old, he and his family moved to Worthington, Minnesota. Once O’Brien graduated high school, he attended Macalester College. There, he got drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, though he opposed it. The time O’Brien spent in Vietnam had a major impact on his life.

O’Brien was honorably discharged in 1970 and came back home to continue his education, attending Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard in 1973, O’Brien became a writer for the Washington Post and started writing short stories based on his childhood growing up in Worthington. Yet, another impactful time that influenced his writing was the time he spent in Vietnam. In fact, this time in …show more content…

For example in the chapter, O’Brien announces that “A true war story is never moral”(O’Brien 65), but, later on in the chapter he contradicts himself conveying that “ In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth ”(O’Brien 74). He starts off saying a true war story has no morals, but then he explains that the moral means everything to a war story, which contradicts his earlier statement. This contradictory excerpt from the chapter parallels the idea of the Vietnam war in the fact that to make peace, there had to be war and bloodshed to solve the problem that the United States and North Vietnam had with one another. War is contradictory in itself ,and O’Brien’s contradictory motif illustrates it well. In fact, the idea of war is a reoccurring topic in “How to Tell a True War Story,” and O’Brien illustrates this idea of war with many other devices as …show more content…

Having this constant burden and responsibility soldiers had to be able to think efficiently and in a timely manner or take the chance of losing one another (Tian n. pag.). Thus, throughout the chapter, O’Brien uses telegraphic sentence to embody a soldier's mindset. He writes “There is no virtue,” “It all happened,” “Nobody said much,” “Nobody listens [and] Nobody hears nothing”(O’Brien 65-75). By using telegraphic sentences, O’Brien clearly portrays a soldier’s thoughts. Because a telegraphic sentence is short and to the point, it illustrates the short, quick thinking that the soldiers had to make during the war (Harris n. pag.). Yet, during the chapter, O’Brien uses more than just telegraphic sentences to illustrate concepts of

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