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Summary Of Style By Tim O Brien

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In “Style” by Tim O'Brien, he writes about a girl in the village who danced. The American Soldiers came through and burned down a village, and despite all of the destruction and death, this girl still danced. The men of the platoon speculated, but couldn’t come to a conclusion as to why she wouldn’t stop. Azar thought it was a strange ritual, but Dobbins believed it to be the fact that she just liked to. After the fact, Azar mocked the girl by trying to dance like her, but Dobbins obviously didn’t find it even the slightest bit of funny. He jumped up and took Azar from behind and threatened to dump him in a nearby well if he didn’t dance properly. He said, “Dance Right”(130). Within the first couple sentences, direct characterization about …show more content…

She took “tiny”(129) steps and would do a “slow”(129) twirl. No one understood what she was doing, and they continued to question her with the most commonly used phrase, plainly and simply, “Why’s she dancing?”(129). Her family was dead, but she moved “gracefully” with her hands against her ears. He then moves into using similes to describe the burning village; it “smelled like straw”(130) and the smoke moved in “patches like fog”(130). This showed the heavy atmosphere that they were in and despite the fact that they were in the middle of a village burning like hell, she still danced. She “danced through the smoke”(130) and her face had a look that was “quiet and composed”(130). All of the words O’Brien used to describe the girl were words that could ever be used to describe a war, and that is what this girl is. They didn’t know but her dancing made just as much sense to them as the war did to her. She was a beautiful contrast to a very ugly war and in her mind the only thing that could’ve made the war uglier was if she didn’t find a way to escape it. She is the representation of how every man in the war or person being impacted by the war has to find a way to mentally flee the madness taking place around them. It doesn’t make sense to anyone, whether it be dancing or wearing stockings around their neck, but it doesn’t have to. That’s

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