Rat becomes angered when he doesn’t receive a response from the sister. These two events later lead to Rat torturing and killing a baby water buffalo. This is showing the reader how some react to the horrible situations they are witness to while at war. The next story seems to be told from O’Brien’s memory of that same day. He walks you through the mission, pulling the reader right into the scenery of the day.
The Truth Behind The True War Story One would think that a true war story would be one of the easiest stories to tell. The presumption being that a man (or woman) goes to war, experiences it in all its guts, glitz, glamour and glory, returns home in part or in whole, writes about what they have seen, and everybody gets an honest image of what war really is. However, the title of the Tim O’Brien tale, “How to Tell a True War story,” suggests this is not always the case. This title invokes the notion that telling a true war story is a tricky proposition which requires a bit of guidance and longshoreman “know-how.” Why is this? It’s not like writing about teenage romance or mystical monsters, where the author must portray great streams of emotion, or create conjured up images of ghoulish beasts seen only in our nightmares.
Chapter 2 Amir talks about how he and his father Baba lived in a beautiful house in Kabul while Hassan and his father Ali lived in a small hut nearby. One thing Amir and Hassan have in common is no mother figure. Amir’s mother died while giving birth to him and Hassan’s mother left him a week after he was born for the circus to be a dancer. Ali and Sanaubar were first cousins which makes the perfect match for marriage but Ali was devoted to his religion and Sanaubar was devoted to her men. The chapter ends by a group of soldiers harassing Hassan about his mother and calling him a Hazara.
Yesterday, the citizens of Verona were shocked at the discovery of a double death. Two young teenagers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet’s bodies were discovered in the Capulet family tomb; both of them dead. Initial investigation shows that the two committed suicide. One by sword and the other by poison. It appears that Romeo went down to mourn Juliet inside the Capulet tomb when he encountered Country Paris who was supposed to have wed Juliet last week.
Wilfred Owen believed he had a duty to tell the truth. How does he tell the truth about war in the poem ‘The Sentry’ Wilfred Owen served in World War One as a second lieutenant, giving him a true taste of war and the horrors it brought along with it. Unlike other war poets, such as Rupert Brooke author of ‘The Soldier’, Owen used his experiences of war and put them into words, rather than idealising war. He never wanted to glorify war or make it out to be something other than the truth. He said his main concern was ‘war and the pity of war’ He felt it was his responsibility as a poet to tell the truth and bring to light to atrocities of modern warfare, in a way others could or would not.
As Huck escapes he leaves behind clues to mislead his father and community, “I took the axe and smashed in the door. I beat it and hacked it considerable a-doing it. I fetched the pig in, and took him back nearly to the table and hacked into his throat with the axe, and laid him down on the ground to bleed...” (33). Huck deceives his entire community, but he does it with good intention in order to escape from his harmful father. The willingness of Huck to conform to violence highlights how badly he wants to escape his community and live freely.
O’Brien’s narrative shows that the storyteller has the power to influence his or her listener’s opinions. Much like the way war distorts a soldier’s perceptions of right and wrong, O’Brien’s story warps readers’ perceptions of ugliness and beauty. He writes these fictional stories in order to engage readers and put them into an empathetic mindset bringing them closer to the characters. The significance of a story “comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (74).
Each chapter usually has a moral, idea, or opinion behind it, while still managing to maintain its role as a piece of the larger picture. The main perspective that delivers the idea of the chapter is told either by a character in the book that plays a major role or by the narrator. O’Brien states several times that his novel contains a blend of fiction and reality. He mentions that sometimes even he does not know what is true or not, referring to this as “metafiction”. O’Brien believes that the reader is only capable of understanding war to a certain extent and that no one can understand war fully, not even the people that were or are still there.
Meaning the perceptions of the labeled truths is a result of our translation of incomplete experiences into new perception resulting from what he or she could retain from the original experience. Those variety of truths all connect to a main idea that allows them to be truths, this is explained in Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell War Story”. O’Brien observed while trying to retell his war stories that alterations appeared when he was retelling it, but found this doesn’t make the altered stories false because they retained the same basis or idea from the unaltered experience causing them to be truths. Truth, in essence, is constantly being translated from limited experiences in an effort to convey a similar idea as the original experience so recipients can partially experience that experience believable. Due to our limitations as recipients, which cause truth to vary among us, discovering truth becomes impossible because of its constant changes.
“This guy, was caught slacking on the job, you know like a brother does who works 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. One of Cyrus’ men found him and brought him to Cyrus… I heard that Cyrus used a sickle to slice the brother up, and if we are caught I don’t wanna another body on the pavement.” “Jeez man, this dude is sick in the head. He don’t make no sense brother.” “I know but let’s just carry on here, the day is nearly over.” “Okay, but I can’t believe that he shot that guy, this is cruel Tyson,” he said with tears slowly falling from his eyes. “Michael, keep it calm,” Tyson said sternly without raising his