English Paper on Tim Obrien

Jasmine Meyers

Mr. Nickell

ENGL 1213 MWF 8:00

14 March 2014

Tim O’Brien and War Literature

In Tim O’Brien’s 2009 edition of The Things They Carried, O’Brien puts together a collection of stories created and experienced by him and his men, The Alpha Company, which depict the Vietnam War from a different standpoint. In explaining the Vietnam War as well as telling the honest truth within the stories of The Alpha Company, O’Brien uses two types of truths in order to convey his experience of the Vietnam War. The two types of truths O’Brien uses are the real truth and the story truth. The real truth is actuality and what really happened, while the story truth is what O’Brien would have liked to happen. In the article, “The Functions of War Literature” by Catharine Savage Brosman, there are a wide range of techniques used to describe war literature. Brosman’s research gives the ultimate background on war literature and why stories and novels are written in different ways and forms to create that pathway from the writer to the reader to understand novels and the stories within them. An analysis of O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Brosman’s article “The Functions of War Literature” both explain war using different techniques. Fiction, the literary image of war and the heroic mode are all functions in Brosman’s article that help create the image O’Brien is trying to depict to the readers.

Fiction in my opinion is something that is not true or real, it is something made up to seem real. In Brosman’s article she states, “In fiction, the linear movement of plot—even if loose—and of prose itself, and the unavoidable interpretation of material that comes from selection and shaping, create a fiction rationality that tends to overcome formlessness and thus seems to ratify the experience” (Brosman 86). In explaining this quote, Brosman is simply trying to convey fiction as formless and implying that anything can be added to a selection to enhance the meaning even by...