War can be defined as “an active struggle between competing entities. It’s truly hard to tell who is right or wrong during a war. Both sides are fighting for what they believe in and what is true to their heart. In the end there is always two things promised – destruction and death. These two objects can explain the result in every facet of war from the physical to emotional. In “How to Tell a true war Story” O’Brien explores the relationship between the events during a war and the art of telling those events.
O’Brien doesn’t come to a conclusion on what is a true war story. He writes that one can’t generalize the story as well. According to O’Brien, war can be anything from love and beauty to the most horrid thing ever experienced. The story doesn’t even have to have a meaning.
Evidence of both descriptions of war leading to death and destruction being used is how O’Brien tells of Curt Lemons death. He tells it as a love story with the scenery being described as being beautiful. In addition to O’Brien referencing it to a love story he also includes the gruesome details of how Curt Lemon died. These stories not only shape the listeners perception and attitude of the war, but it also affects the one telling the story. Some stories are true and others are rather embellished. The storyteller, speaking from the point of being in the war, has usually been through the most traumatic events ever in their life.
The Essay on Commentary How to Tell True War Story
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a work of metafiction that manages to test fiction in its very nature through the chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story.” The blurred line between reality and the imagination is explored by the given account—the reader is alienated and forced to think, does the truth matter in a war story? This chapter alternates in narration between O’Brien as a soldier ...
Does the storyteller even know the truths of the stories? Having to deal with such things, more times than often, the soldiers have emotionally died and their personal self has been destroyed. This is similar to what happened to Krebs in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” Krebs has returned home to find that it is not that everybody and the world around him has changed, but he was the one that had changed. He has fought in some of the worst wars there were and he didn’t want to come back home. Krebs dreaded coming back to the states, and would have preferred to stay overseas. Krebs was once used to a normal life. He went to a Christian school and was a part of a fraternity.
His perception on life had changed drastically after enlisting in the military and fighting in a war. When he returned home, the girls that he saw on the street were the same as when he was there years ago. His father still parks his car in the same spot day in and day out. His mother tries to encourage him to get a job, but he doesn’t care. He was so accustomed to the repetition of a soldier’s life. He couldn’t adjust to the typical lifestyle that other soldiers made.
Somehow you can see the struggle he is going through. After the physical war, there was a war going on internally. Krebs had lost his emotion and will to care. The horror he experienced actually seeing first-hand life and death situations were incomprehensible to his parents.
There was no way they would be able to identify with him. It doesn’t matter where anyone played a role in a war; the nature of the war itself leaves a tremendous impact on everyone’s life. Just retelling a story the one who experienced the actual war is never going to convey it in a manner that would actually depict the events visually. Sometimes the soldiers recover from such event and sometimes they don’t. There is no solution ever to war nor is there a remedy for the after effects, no matter the spectrum.
