It Has Been a Few Weeks Now

I remember that first day of class, opening the door after climbing three flights of stairs, eyes wide open, a thousand thoughts swirling around in my head. The college lifestyle had not quite settled in yet, I was both overwhelmed and interested as everything was new to me. In addition to this excited, anxious, and confused sort of emotion I was feeling was a professor mention, “I am going to manipulate you, lie to you”. These confident words followed a page long introduction about Professor’s life, which I honestly had no idea what was true and what was not. During the reading of that short biography, looking back now I can say it would be fairly easy to identify what really occurred in Professor Schwartz’s life and what did not. There was a fine line between the true statements and the false.

Since moving on from day one, I believe the class has progressed and the truths and the lies have faded into a gray area and have become much harder to identify. For example, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle I knew that obviously the fictional tools such as ice-nine which ends the world using its’ freezing power and Bokononism a fictional religion because when considering the world of reality, none of these concepts could be applied to real life. Then moving on to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried the truths and lies became much more difficult to distinguish. Personally, as I read chapter after chapter it could all have been “real”. Since I enjoy reading war stories, I have read many in my life; and this is the first time I have been asked to consider the truths and the lies within the text. A tough task to ask, because after reading so many for years, I have automatically convinced myself that what is mentioned in a war story is real. The stories told by O’Brien whether true or not, could be applied to a battlefield in Vietnam during the war, which makes the truths harder to separate from the lies. The struggle continues, but every text seems to bring a new investigation to really dig deep and read the text for what it’s really worth.