Furthermore, in environments that are highly conducive to trauma, such as war or a paramilitary educational institution that is predominantly filled with Caucasian males who are permitted to attack one another during a certain period in their careers, conventional morals can also become distorted .The differences of right and wrong that apply to the outside world, the world that was inhabited by people before they left it to take place in an environment highly dissimilar to the one that reality largely takes place in no longer apply. The following quotation from Mitchell in which he is describing this aspect of Vietnam demonstrates this fact. "The old rules riles are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong" (O'Brien, 276). Although O'Brien is making this statement about war, it applies into other realms conducive to trauma such as the Citadel, a traditionally all-male institution in which younger, weaker students were to take on the roles of women, as the following quotation shows. "The beaten knobs were the women, "stripped" and humiliated, and the predatory upperclassmen were the men, who bullied and pillaged" (Faludi, 90). The distortion of reality in such a situation is clear, particularly since both upperclassmen and lowerclassmen were males. However, in a situation such as this in which trauma regularly occurs,...
The difficulty that O'Brien describes in the accuracy of war stories, and which can be found in Faludi's interview of the students who pulled chest hair out of underclassmen (due to the inconsistence in the recollections of that event) alludes to this fact, as does the attempt to make underclassmen women and the difficulty in applying old rules of reality to situations of war.
At the same time, the style is expected to give the reader an idea of what is happening, and that too in a more refined version. In his language there are poetic references for the brutality and masculinity of war as feminine features. He has talked about the "star shaped hole" and this reminds most about the American flag as also the expectation of the country to kill and
Krajek points out that what she took from O'Brien's lecture was the fact that a fiction author can help the reader connect with the story in reality, even if the story is not true. "His lecture's overarching message illustrated his belief that fiction, while a product of a novelist's imagination and not true in the literal sense, gets closer to the meaning of emotional and spiritual truth" (Krajek, 2009). The
True War Story," by Tim O'Brien. Specifically, it will discuss are there universal truths that apply to all people and societies; or do we live in a state of relativism, one in which perception dictates how we will respond to the tasks that we are given, or to the world around us? What happened to Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon? What part of Rat Kiley's story do you think
I can make myself feel again (O'Brien, p. 180). And, through story truth, what the story is able to do for O'Brien, it becomes able also to do for the reader. In "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brien further elaborates on his need for stories universally. Through make-believe -- imagination, stories, fiction -- O'Brien finds that he can not only resurrect the dead but also lay a barrier between himself and
psychological consequences of war, of fighting in a war, of eating and sleeping in a "war zone," are not merely limited to the implications of witnessing and partaking in death; war deeply influences the mental attitudes of those involved because of the organizational framework of power and authority that soldiers are subject to. The common assumption is that soldiers' troubles coping with war are somehow linked to the extraordinary
The whole country. Vietnam, the place talks." The environment sinks under their skin, uncomfortable and yet unavoidable -- in short, hell. There is also a growing sense of insanity among the men that O'Brien describes in this story. There is the crack-up of the team that Mitchell Sanders describes, and the idea of playing catch with a smoke grenade as an idea of fun -- both of these instance reflect
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