O Brien Rhetorical Analysis Essay

The theme of “How to Tell a True War Story” is war, the true stories, and how it is perceived to those who don’t understand it. Author O’Brien really shows the readers the true meaning of war and its truths and lies. O’Brien does this by giving a gung-ho story, and a tear jerking story of how it is easily told in a lie, and then explain what truly happens. “How to Tell a True War Story” gives insight on how telling a story should be told and how to identify a false story to a true story. Truth plays a great role, in fact the truth is used to underlie what really happened and what the soldiers thought happened.

1.Guilt is one of the worst things accompanied by death. Guilt plays a huge role throughout the novel. In war, men are constantly dying and these men all become best friends with one another. For example, Norman Bowker felt a tremendous amount of quilt towards the death of Kiowa.

Gloria Swanson once said, “Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don’t know how”. Throughout the nonlinear novel The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes stories about his experiences surrounding the Vietnam War. He writes stories with intense memories and even descriptions of death in order to give readers the feeling of truly being there.

In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien is successful in addressing essential details about emotional life of soldiers during the Vietnam War instead of historically recorded facts. O’Brien tends to focus profusely more on the emotional impact on each aspect of the war. He certainly does not focus on the historical events or facts. The premise of the novel regards the soldiers, nothing in this novel is entirely factual, as it was comprised of mostly emotional anecdotes and personal stories of those soldiers. Because the focus of his work of literature is not the premise of historical fact, he has no obligation to convey the pure truth in contrast to adjusting the facts to appeal to his preferred focus, the emotional aspect of the war.

Over twenty years after his service in Vietnam was concluded, Tim O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried (1990). Tim O’Brien is a veteran as well as an author of memoirs, short stories, and war stories. O’Brien grew up an all-American child, after high school he went onto college and received his BA in Political Science. In 1968 O’Brien was drafted in to the United States Army and was then sent to fight in the Vietnam War. Twenty-two years after his service, O’Brien wrote the book The Things They Carried.

Vietnam War “War does not determine who is right - only who is left.” ~ Bertrand Russell. The famous quote from Bertrand Russell describes the reality of war. War only lets the powerful and the wealthy side win and not the righteous side. On an average 378,000 people die each year at war while 1,450,000 people died in the Vietnam war.

“True” is a word that defines as in accordance with fact or reality ("true: definition of true in Oxford dictionary (American English) (US)", 2016). The Things They Carried, a novel written by Tim O’Brien, defines as a “true” story because it discusses soldiers’ real experiences in the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien wrote his novel based on his experience in the war as a young adult and his account of the Vietnam War has created discrepancy among readers on whether his novel is a “true” story or a glorified piece of exaggerated fiction. The Things They Carried was written to convey soldiers’ real experiences of the war and therefore is a “true” story.

Literature review of “The Things they Carried” and “The White Heron.” The Things They Carried This is a collection of stories given by different narrators about their times and experiences as members of a platoon group of soldiers during the Vietnam War. There are at least three main narrators of the stories in the book, the author Tim O’Brien, Mitchell Sanders and Bob Kiley.

“A true war story is never moral [...] if the story seems moral, do not believe it” (page 68). Tim O’Brien explains to us that if one of the stories teach you something; the story was stretched, if it makes us feel good; it was a lie. Even if the writer tried to make the story true, the mind blocks the heart stabbing and the brain boggling details from what happened in order to save yourself tragedy, so the so called “True Story” isn 't all that true.

Military Fiction Captures the Grim Reality of Vietnam War Veteran Raymond Bell’s novel takes a powerful, gut-wrenching look on the emotional effects of the war. The Vietnam War is still deeply rooted in the American conscious not only because it is brutal with which it was fought and controversial for it symbolized American aggression, but also because of its psychological impact on the soldiers involved. Raymond Bell’s war novel Lost Years takes readers to understand what the war did to those who were thrust into it. Written by the Vietnam War veteran himself under the pen name Bobby Bell, Lost Years features two men trapped in history and in their emotions.