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What is the difference between happening truth and story truth
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In the course of The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien draws a distinction between "happening truth" and "story-truth." He claims that "story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth." The legitimacy of this claim depends on the context.
One instance where story-truth may be truer than happening-truth is if the people hearing about the event only know the story-truth. To the people who only know story-truth, it may appear to be truer than happening-truth because to their knowledge the story-truth is the happening-truth.
Another example of when story-truth could be truer than happening-truth is when the event is looked at through an emotional state. In the chapter titled “Good Form” in the novel The Things They Carried , Tim O’Brien expresses
that he wants the reader to feel what he felt, he goes on to say he wishes the reader to understand that story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth. He then tells the same story twice, but the first time he tells the story, he says the happening-truth. The happening-truth is that he did not look at the body because he was too afraid, he tells the reader “I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.”(O’Brien 203) The second time he tells the story, he tells what feels truer to his emotional state, the story-truth. “Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.”(O’Brien 204) The story-truth is more applicable than the happening-truth. Another situation in which story-truth is truer than happening-truth is when what happened cannot be separated from what seemed to happen. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.”(O’Brien 78) In this circumstance it shows that reality is ambigous when processed by the human mind and that there isn’t a clear-cut line between story-truth and happening-truth.
The storyteller had not witnessed the strange happenings at the school but claimed to know someone who had seen the disturbances. As a performance, the telling of this story was very matter a fact and my friend did not self-aggrandize; the performance was quick, to the point, but not particularly dramatic. The storyteller told the legend as fact and was not melodramatic about her role as storyteller.
There are over thirty genres of books in the world. All of stories are told and written in many different forms from written to spoken, action to romance, or fiction to non-fiction. But, all stories have something in common--a theme that is intended to make a difference to the reader. No matter what the story is about, it is centered around a strong theme. The author of The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien., uses a separate theme in each of his vignettes. But, these themes aren't always depicted through truth. "I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now , and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented"(171). O'Brien uses story-truth and happening-truth in The Things They Carried to show a great theme. In certain cases in the book, story-truth shows theme better and happening-truth isn't used and vice versa. In the vignette "The
...r because it seems impossible to reconstruct an event from this objective point of view. Maybe the point of telling stories is not trying to recreate the reality of a past event, but it is the message that matters because that might be in the end the only thing that does not necessarily depend on single details of the story, but on the overall picture of an event. That is why to O’Brien another important component of a war story is the fact that a war story will never pin down the definite truth and that is why a true war story “never seems to end” (O’Brien, 425). O’Brien moves the reader from the short and simple statement “This is the truth” to the conclusion that, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nohting much is ever very true” (O’Brien, 428). These two statements frame the entire irony of the story, from its beginning to its end. Almost like the popular saying “A wise man admits that he knows nothing.”
The stories can be completely true, completely fictional, or a mixture of both but no matter what as long as there is someone around who reads the story, the characters are saved from their “deaths.” The people or characters go on to live in the hearts and minds of the readers, who can go back on the journey again as long as they pick up the book and turn the pages. The stories may not all be factual or about real people, but the effect the stories have on the readers is what makes all stories true and really and is what saves us
One of the later entries in the book called “Good form”, helps alleviate the suspicion of dishonesty in the stories by bluntly telling the reader that all the other entries are a mix of both fact and fiction. O’Brien feels the need to make up parts of his stories due to the fact that he wants the reader to experience emotions as opposed to mental visuals. He describes these emotion-laden scenes as “story-truth” due to the fact that they are part story and part truth. The parts that are only for emotio...
Storytelling is a way of expressing one’s imagination through fanciful adventures and serve a variety of purposes. One important reason is to capture a special moment and endure it but mostly because it unites us and of course entertains us. In Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and Tim Burton’s The Big Fish, storytelling is seen as more important than the truth. Throughout the novel Life of Pi, and the film The Big Fish, it can be argued that the truth is intertwined with the lies in each story to form a new kind of truth. An example of this would be when Pi retells his story to the two Japanese men in a way in which he makes the animals human and introduces a different version of the truth. Both the film and movie also share a unique way of story telling because what they both share is a common moral “quest” which involves the main character, who is usually the hero, must overcome challenges in order to achieve a goal or reward at the end.
O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried layering themes on top of themes, but what makes it amazing is the way he presents these themes. Every single one intertwined with another. Burdens. Truth. Death. The soldiers carried their burdens and the death of their friends and enemies, and they live on as storytellers telling their war stories, but can there really be a true war story?
...eauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery… the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (78). According to story truth Mary Anne gave into darkness and became cold, but story truth does not matter. The absolute truth is much more dark and sad than that. Mary Anne struggled to define herself in a place that gave her the opportunity. Fossie’s stubbornness and inability to accept Mary Anne’s journey, however, led to her being consumed by ambiguous darkness. Is the final truth for Mary Anne similar to Curt Lemon’s? If “[a] thing [can] happen and be a total lie; [and] another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (80), then maybe the final truth for Mary Anne was that she really did “know exactly who [she was]” (106). The ending of Mary Anne’s story could have been beautiful and civil to her, but ugly and chaotic to you, and that was her liberation.
Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried challenges the reader to question what they are reading. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story”, O’Brien claims that the story is true, and then continues to tell the story of Curt’s death and Rat Kiley’s struggle to cope with the loss of his best friend. As O’Brien is telling the story, he breaks up the story and adds in fragments about how the reader should challenge the validity of every war story. For example, O’Brien writes “you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (69), “in many cases a true war story cannot be believed” (71), “almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true” (81), and “a thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth (83). All of those examples are ways in which O’Brien hinted that his novel is a work of fiction, and even though the events never actually happened – their effects are much more meaningful. When O’Brien says that true war stories are never about war, he means that true war stories are about all the factors that contribute to the life of the soldiers like “love and memory” (85) rather than the actual war. Happening truth is the current time in which the story was being told, when O’Brien’s daughter asked him if he ever killed anyone, he answered no in happening truth because it has been 22 years since he was in war and he is a different person when his daughter asked him. Story truth
The “better story” is not always the one that is easy to believe. Sure, all the hypotheses are possible, but there is quite a fine line between the better story, and an absurd story. We only know so much about our characters in the story of In the Lake of the Woods. As for what is the truth, what really happened, well that’s up to the reader.
be because one of the people is describing or telling the event the way it was told
...erstanding this “truth” is to not just simply look for one given truth but analyze the whole story and see it from many different perspectives. There is no one absolute truth. I have watched this movie three times and I still haven’t able to figure out if he is Sammy or if it was his wife who was diabetic or the fact that is teddy really John G.? There is so much that one could predict and interpret and I think that’s exactly what Christopher Nolan aimed for.
O’Brien subjectifies truth by obscuring both fact and fiction within his storytelling. In each story he tells there is some fuzziness in what actually happened. There are two types of truths in this novel, “story-truth” and “happening-truth” (173). “Happening-truth” is what happened in the moment and “story-truth” is the way the storyteller reflects and interprets a situation. O’Brien uses these two types of truths to blur out the difference between fact and fiction. For example, when Rat Kiley tells a story he always overexaggerates. He does this because “he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt,” (85). This is the same for most storytellers, even O’Brien. When he tells the story of Norman Bowker he makes his own truth stating, “He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own” (154). Not everything that O’Brien said was fact, however, it made the the meaning of the story effective and significant. O’Brien reveals that he never killed a man after devoting a whole short story to “The Man I Killed.” When his daughter asks “Daddy, tell the truth, did you ever kill anybody?” he can honestly say “Of course not,” or “Yes,” (172). This illustrates the subjectivity of truth, how both truths can in fact be true. This goes for all the stories told in this novel, the truth is held in the storyteller 's
"story" of the Symposium may lead you to believe that it is a fiction, just
In my Theory of Knowledge class, I learned that belief and truth can be very contrasting ideas. In my opinion, I can believe something that may not necessarily be true. However, there can also be truth that is impossible for me to believe. Belief is a mental state in which someone is confident in the existence of something, but may not necessarily have objective proof to support their claim. Truth is objective and public; it is eternal and unchanging without biast. People can believe in something different and can also all believe in the same idea. The overlap between truth and belief creates knowledge; therefore, an acquisition of knowledge will bring us further to what we believe to be a ‘truth’. Knowledge can be acquired in several ways, such as using emotion, reason and sense perception. These ways of knowing affect how we perceive reality, and help us create our beliefs.