In “How to Tell a True War Story” Tim O’Brien uses different techniques in his story telling. One of O’Brien’s unconventional techniques in his story is repetition. Throughout history war has caused not just physical damage to a soldier but also psychological effects, in particularly PTSD. The repetition throughout the story reveals the psychological repercussions of war. PTSD caused many veterans to have symptoms that wouldn’t even show up until years later. Some of the symptoms include reliving the past in nightmares and flashbacks, fear in certain situations that could trigger memories of war, and difficulty in performing daily tasks. The way that O’Brien writes shows that there is a side effect of war in which the person is sort of scatter brained. To cope with the trauma of war people reinvent the events of the past, they sort of recall events in a different way or tell it in a different scope. O’Brien retells the death of Curt Lemon multiple times throughout the story and each comes with different changes. The way that O’Brien describes Curt Lemon’s death is in a beautiful but realistic way. O’Brien’s writing is also choppy and sometimes inconsistent. He jumps from different stories of his war memories.. The main point of O’Brien’s story is to show the psychological repercussions of war and how the effects carry on in a veteran’s life. Even though a war story may not contain any truth in events, the real truth to be taken away is the grief and sorrows of war and the emotional and psychological outcomes.
Would you say that the repetition and such that is in O'Brien's writing is deliberate, such as an elaboration on his metafiction, or that it is an unintentional effect on his writing caused by the repercussions of war? I agree that the repetition shows how the brain of a veteran can be scattered, especially concerning the occurrence of traumatic events. I saw the discontinuity and scatteredness as an example of the disconnect that a soldier might feel once they are home and he difficulty to make sense of all that happened. I gather that things that happen in war can overload the senses and cause the brain to encode the memories incorrectly. I think you have a good interpretation of the chapter in saying that the real truth of a war story can be taken from the emotions and psychological outcomes.
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