Commentary on Extract from the Truth About War

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This extract from the short story 'The Truth about War' deals with the ambiguity and contradictions of war; particularly focussing on the comparison between the beauty and brutality of it. O'Brien tries to convey to us through the use of compare and contrast that there is hope of peace in war. War will make you grow up due to what you have experienced. War will make you value life. O'Brien's extract conveys to the readers the contradictory feelings that war evokes in a person. War can be seen in different perspectives and can be felt with many different emotions. The author describes war as astonishing; an adjective rarely used in the general opinion. But O'Brien has seen and felt first hand, and writes that war makes you grow up and learn about yourself as a person. You learn to value life in those desperate moments where death comes close. “You're never more alive than when you're almost dead.” 'Close to death' means 'close to life'. “At it's core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.” War and peace is the main theme of paragraph 3 and at its core; abstract. The two are so different yet they are so similar. The purpose of this extract is to convey the various feelings experienced by someone who has experienced war to someone who has not. These emotions are vivid, but can be very difficult to understand by someone who has not witnessed war first hand. They are also contradictory, and he wants us to see that there are two sides to it. And we are swept up as O'Brien goes into the depths of the imagery of war, not only negatively but positively as well. He approaches war in a way to allow us readers-see that war is not only a battle that is typically seen by most, but an experience in which one is completely aware of their

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