One of my class's main topics of discussion last week was the "true or not?" question the book poses. I touched on this in my blog last week, but deciding whether certain aspects of O'Brien's book are true or not is something that I'll never fully be able to do. As an interested reader and granddaughter of a Vietnam War veteran, I want so badly for his stories to be true--the gruesome and sad ones, too. I want to know what it actually was like in Vietnam from a soldier's perspective, maybe because my grandfather always avoided war stories. Maybe, like Elizabeth mentioned in our class discussion, the actions of former soldiers are blurred by all of the violence and shock they face. Maybe a soldier telling a regular civilian that he/she killed someone brings old demons and negative thoughts back.
Maybe thinking of the war is too traumatizing. We as students will never really know the answer.
This question in the discussion really led me to think--are any of the war stories we hear in the present day fully accurate and truthful? While news cameras and reporters can try to share all of the facts and images of the war with its viewers, the only people who really know what is actually happening are the soldiers fighting in the war. I think the reason that viewers and readers of war stories are so fascinated by war and what is happening abroad is because they too cannot fully know if every piece of information they are receiving is true. Like O'Brien's book, oftentimes it's left to one's own personal interpretation and judgement to decide if a story is true or not and whether that person chooses to believe it.
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ReplyDeleteRachel, I wrote about a similar topic on my blog. I actually read an article about how O'Brien wrote his book because he wanted the war to feel more personal to readers and not just have war be an abstract idea of bullets and bombs. He wanted to have readers feel his emotions. I think it's hard to have any kind of true story because we all have a different view of an experience and the world in general. A lot of people use the example "the sky is blue" as a fact, but in the morning it's red and at twilight it's purple. The sky even is green if you catch the right moment when the sun sets. I think like the sky the truth is a spectrum that we all see a little differently.
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