Article

So the article that was about The Things They Carried was pretty interesting. Like the author sees that O'Brien is having this internal conflict about telling the truth and twisting it a little. O'Brien talks about in his novel that sometimes the truth isn't that exciting. He says "in a true war story, nothing is exactly true" (88). People see things differently and take sides. In his novel he tells the same story twice but differently. He tells it as if its true and he's in it. And then he changes it to where he is talking about a handsome boy in the war. People are captivated by the story about the boy. They can make the character come to life and do whatever their mind want to. If its true, then no imagination can take place and what is said is final. I also, like in the article that it talked about how past wars were like a novel in that it was everything about it was known to everyone. Everyone knew about what the sides were about and what was happening. But with Vietnam, not everything was clear. Like postmodernism. Vietnam is considered a postmodern war. People did not understand why America was over there and what each side was about. I kinda think that the article is criticizing O'Brien in that he doesn't tell anything true and that he just tells the gore and bad things that happened in Vietnam. Reflecting on the past and wanting the reader to sympathize with him. With the title of the book to be considered, I can see this. The Things They Carried. They carried stories that were sad and crazy. Like the the guy that killed himself in the book. He could be a totally not a real character or he could be real and that he may not taken his life but its might be what the soldiers felt like. They had this burden about what they saw in the war and they wanted to tell it to others to get relief. Because many people are not interested in war stories, the soldiers change the story to make it interesting to people. Or so the people can understand what they went through.