Sunday, October 31, 2010
O'Briens Purpose in Writing The Things They Carried
Through discussing the workings of stories, O'Brien admits to the reader his purpose behind writing "The Things They Carried". O'Brien states that "the thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head" (O'Brien 218). Through writing "The Things They Carried," he is creating a story which will make the spirits of those who are no longer in his life (such as Kiowa, Lavender, Linda) come alive in his head. O'Brien writes so that the readers of the novel will experience the people he knew through his eyes, the way he has permanently recorded them and intends them to be remembered and seen. For example, the beautiful innocence of Linda which he paints in "The Lives of the Dead" is the memory O'Brien intends to keep of her and immortalize through a story, "hoping that others might then dream [about her] along with [him]" (O'Brien 218).
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poignant response, Sophie. Demonstrates a high conceptual understanding as well.
ReplyDeleteFor God's sakes,it's all fiction! He's toying with your mind! Jedi mind tricks! RESIST THE LIES!!!
ReplyDeleteYes, he's very tricky. But Tim, give me a definition of truth.
ReplyDeleteDefinition of TRUTH
ReplyDelete1a archaic : fidelity, constancy b : sincerity in action, character, and utterance
2a (1) : the state of being the case : fact (2) : the body of real things, events, and facts : actuality (3) often capitalized : a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality b : a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true c : the body of true statements and propositions
3a : the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality b chiefly British : true 2 c : fidelity to an original or to a standard.
O'Brien talks about truth through gut feeling, not facts. Hell, he almost sounds like a polititian.
(Thanks for responding to my jackass comment)
If spiritual reality and accordance with fact is Truth, then this is a true story.
ReplyDeleteTruth is irrelevant. What is true today is false tommorow. Facts keep us in the real world and give words meaning.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome! The difficulty of O'Brien's search for a transcendent definition of truth is that he's hampered by the signifier-signified orthodoxy of language. Language, if one thinks about it, is our most problematic form of communication.
ReplyDelete