OBriens Things They Carried Essay: An American Nightmare

History has shaped every country and their people, in particular nix experiences like the Holocaust in Nazi-Germany or the Vietnam warfarefare, involving the United States in a grueling controversy from 1964 until 1975. The author Tim OBrian confronts an American audience in his terse stories The Things They Carried with the inhumane consequences of political and military power decisions by rewriting invoice from a subjective,individual point of view. Thus he forces the audience to take a stand, to ask questions, to get morally and ethically involved. The narrative structure of the bang of the Song Tra Bong and How to prescribe a True War legend contains two aims, the first on being a discourse roughly the characters of Vietnam stories. The I, the teller, introduces Rat Kiley as his source for the narrative that follows. He characterizes stories closely war as strange, swirling back and forth across the parry between trivia and bedlam, the mad and mundane. The stories hav e a purport of their own, reality is not absolute, not final. With this image he describes the ambiguity of war itself, the normality that turns into insanity, he summarizes the narrative about(predicate) Mary Ann Bell and her experiences with the war. The narrator clearly states the purposes of these stories, he is not interested in factual truths about the war, he openly questions the reliability of his source Rat had a spirit for exaggeration and overstatement. He wants the audience to feel exactly what he felt, an emotional experience, a subjective approach. The second narrative level tells the story about Mary Ann Bell, the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. The narrator, believably the author, retells Rats story in his own words, so that t... ...ositive as well as its negative accomplishments. But how is this to be done, how do we deal with history personally and politically? Ths author Tim OBrian gives us one answer in How to Tell a True War Story on page 69 You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. It you dont caveat for obscenity, you dont care for the truth if you dont care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come foot talking dirty. In other words if you dont want war watch how you vote. The connotation of this statement is far reaching, it naturally places responsibility on the American government for having participated in the war, but it foremost appeals to the american human race to take responsibility and to use this history, this story to create a ruin future. Works CitedOBrien, Tim. The Things They Carried.New York Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990.