O Brien Quotes And Analysis Essay

1. When O'Brien writes that "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth," he is claiming that the nature of truth is subjective. This applies to war stories, which he claims that if they have a moral, it is untrue. O'Brien states "It's a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness" (O'Brien 68), meaning even true stories will throw in lies to make it more believable. O'Brien encourages skepticism of war stories, saying at the end it comes down to gut instinct on whether believing a story is true or not. War stories with morals are the most likely to be untrue, because war is hell and should not encourage virtue or models of human behavior. O'Brien tells an example

of four men; a grenade sails out and one of the men jumps on it and takes the blast to save the other three. If you ask "Is it true?" and the answer matters, that's a sign it's untrue because you'd feel cheated if it wasn't true. This is how war stories with morals make one feel, you want it to be true because it encourages heroism, but at the end of the day it's a lie to shape morals. True war stories have meanings, and those meanings may be harder to find, but they're there. Lies are often told in true stories to make that meaning easier to find.
2.

A passage that represents O'Brien's style of writing is "It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, It wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seems scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself" (O'Brien 19). He is comparing the soldier's hiding their soft side to them being actors. In a dangerous warzone, there is no time for being soft. They must put up a facade of masculinity, much like an actor puts on a facade of whatever role their playing. This passage is a metaphor, which is very common in The Things They Carried. It's powerful because it's taking the soldiers' inner pain and turning it into so much more. There is no time to mourn over deaths as people are always dying. They've become so accustomed to it and to hiding their emotions that it's so normalized to them and it's part of their "script" as actors. By comparing them to actors in this metaphor, O'Brien is showing how war has changed the soldiers' lives by forcing them to normalize death and keep their emotions locked

up.
3. The passage that stands out to me the most is "To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its 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" (O'Brien 77). He is stating that war is complex. I liked his use of contradictions to exemplify this. There is a lot that even confuses soldiers, who may not know the full story of why they're fighting. But it's that fight near death that causes them to feel the most alive. It is at this moment they are their "truest self" and for the first time they love what's best in themself and the world. I think part of why this passage stuck out to me is because this is similar to the book I read for Quarter 3, Albert Camus's The Plague. When confronted with near-death, that is when people feel the most alive and they begin to become their truest selves, start to love more, and long for more out of life.