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Storytelling In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

553 Words3 Pages

Every day of our lives we are faced with the opportunity to believe and tell many tales, whether true or false, and exaggerations of daily events. Life is almost like a game of cards, we’re all given cards and it’s up to us to decide what, when and how we’re going to play them. Tim O'Brien uses the theme of storytelling in his book, The Things They Carried, to teach lessons from the war, and allow us to understand the baggage that he along with his fellow men carried. When storytelling the main idea is to connect people to the stories being told and the past to the future. Though O’brien offers several examples of storytelling, there are a select few that stick out. In the chapter, Spin, O’Brien says,"Stories are for joining the past to the future. …show more content…

By saying,” Stories are for...when you can’t remember”,he’s telling us that it’s the purpose of storytelling is to bring up the old memories, allowing you to have perspective.The chapter Spin was mainly focused on the stories of all O'Brien's’ military friends, and what things they did or what happened to them. Stories such as, Ted Lavender adopting a puppy, Kiowa teaching Kiley and Jensen the rain dance, and Curt Lemon dying, then hanging in pieces from a tree. Tim connects the past to his future and how he got where he is now through the stories he still tells. O’Brien is seemingly able to describe and remember each person, through just his memory and the process of telling Kathleen. Tim's’ daughter thinks that he is just obsessed with his past and needs to try to get over the past, what she doesn’t realize is he’s only trying to connect his past to his future and get her to understand and see what he had experienced. Tim does a good job in identifying his former friends for Kathleen by connecting them to his war

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