How to tell a true war story essays

Major Critical Theories--survey of criticism from greek classicists to post-modernists Wednesday, August 12, "You dumb cooze It wasn't a war story.

A boy goes to war, his head full of romantic visions of glory, courage, and sacrifice, his heart yearning to achieve heroic deeds, but on the field of battle he finds only death and horror. He sees, suffers, and causes brutal and brutalizing violence.

After the war the boy, now a veteran and a man, returns to the world of peace haunted by his experience, wracked by the central compulsion of trauma and atrocity: The veteran tries to make sense of his memory but finds it all but impossible.

The truth of war, the veteran comes to learn, is a truth beyond words, a truth that can only be known by having been there, an unspeakable truth he must bear for society.

So goes the myth of the trauma hero. This myth informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history. It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. Like all myths, this story frames and filters our perceptions of reality through a set of recognizable and comforting conventions.

It works to convince us that war is a special kind of experience that offers a special kind of truth, a truth that gives those who have been there a special kind of authority. The trauma hero myth also serves a scapegoat function, discharging national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma, the soldier, for the victim of violence, the enemy.

The story, as everyone knows, is of the life and death of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, who as a shooter in Iraq racked up more confirmed kills than any other sniper in American military history.

Kyle served four tours in Iraq as a trigger-puller, then retired and began to work with disabled and traumatized veterans. One day one of these veterans shot him. The opening scene sets the moral stakes: Our hero, played all lockjaw, thousand-yard stare, and darting eyes by Bradley Cooper, must decide whether or not to shoot an Iraqi child whose mother gave him a grenade to throw at an American convoy.

A dust storm envelops the battle and the Americans fight their way out, barely escaping, in a visually striking chaos that serves as a symbolic baptism: Kyle is sucked into the whirlwind and only barely makes it out, leaving his weapon and his lucky Bible behind him. He has been reborn.

Cooper loses his thousand-yard stare and lets his jaw relax, revealing a man who has learned how to turn the lessons of war into the lessons of peace. Instead of helping endangered soldiers by killing Iraqis, he has learned to help wounded soldiers by talking with them and mentoring them in shooting-range therapy.

The myth achieved its mature form in 20th-century war literature, and is often now read as the very definition of war literature itself, even though as the 20th century has worn on, the myth has become increasingly conventional and increasingly self-referential.

In Junewhile recuperating from shellshock at Craiglockhart War Hospital, British Lieutenant Wilfred Owen wrote the first draft of a bitter poem describing the death of a fellow soldier in a gas attack.

The men come under gas attack, and we, with our narrator, helplessly watch one die choking, drowning in air. Owen means to malign war, but according to his logic, it is his very experience of war that gives him privileged access to moral truth beyond anything civilians like Jessie Pope can ever hope to achieve.

The Israeli military historian Yuval Harari has argued that the practice of hallowing the experience of war as trauma grows out of a larger historical shift from recording external deeds as evidence of valor to recording internal experiences as evidence of developing sensibility.

Revolutions in military technology and organization in the early 17th century created the conditions for detaching personal glory from military experience. Once a field of accomplishment, war became a kind of sentimental education.

In the US, this interpretive frame has led to contradictory attitudes about war. On the one hand, Americans denounce war as something uncivilized and exceptional, something only other countries do, something America only does under duress.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except bury it.

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Gino, after all, has seen as much or more war than Lieutenant Henry has. The difference between them is in their sensibility. Those words must be concrete, sensory, metonymic:Tim O’ Brien’s “How to tell a true war story” construes the relationship between the war experiences and the ways of storytelling.

O Brien’s story telling as a narrator shows that the storyteller has the power to form his listener’s experiences and opinions. O'Brien tells us that a true war story is not a moral story, that you can tell a war story is true if it contains obscenity and evil. He says that because of Rat's response to the sister's non-response—that "the dumb cooze never writes back"—you can tell that it's a true war story (How to Tell a True War Story.

“How to Tell a True War Story” or go further with essays on the context and background and links to the best resources around the web. Context; Full Book Quiz; Get ready to write your paper on The Things They Carried with our suggested essay topics, sample essays, and more.

2. Why does this story begin with the line: “This is true.” How does that prepare you, as a reader, for the story? In what sense is “this” true? 3. Find a few of O’Brien’s elements of a “true war story.” (such as, “A true war story is never moral.”) Why does O’Brien believe these elements are important to a .

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