Good Form

Personally I feel that during the act of war humans lose a sense of compassion. “I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces. But I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (180). This book is based off the partial memory of a once-was soldier. Tim O’ Brien even says so himself that there’s story-truth and happening-truth. Parts of stories have to be made up or embellished in order for a war story to survive. It’s always easy to place people and what they were like, but it’s not always easy to tell exactly what happened in a situation. Tim makes due with what he has. I feel that Tim O’ Brien is trying to describe how he felt during the war, and is using fiction Vs. Reality to show it.  His first book, he realized, couldn’t describe how he felt during the war. So in order to make you realize what it’s like he created a fictional book so he could show the readers what was going through his mind. Many people who return from going through such an emotionally bearing task often have mental instability. Tim wants you to understand what he felt, wants you to question yourself and every action you do. That’s a true story that never happened.