Is It What They're Saying or How They're Saying It?

Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien have some stark similarities. First, we are not entirely sure who is narrating the story. At some points it could be the other, and then three sentences later, it could seem like a character. Both authors also have a tendency to be sporadic within what seems to be a storyline, but then turns out to be more a collage of stories. Meaning, their writing mirrors more of a thought process than an actual story. Their order for telling the story is broken, seemingly unintentional, hard to follow, and frustrating at times. It makes it some what difficult for readers to really immerse themselves into the story; perhaps that was the intent. However, not being able to do so lends support to a level of skepticism where readers are not entirely sure how to take or understand the message the author is trying to convey. Is it literal, figurative, or just made up? O’Brien openly acknowledges this to a point when he divulges that the truth is too crazy to believe and that the believable things were made up and added to make the unbelievable things seem more possible. Another similarity between the two writers is their excessive fixation on particular events. They will revisit the same story multiple times. Which could be an indication of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in both; seeing how both men were veterans in horrific wars. Which has caused both of them to be decisively critical of war policy and the attempt at creating causal explanations for wars and what goes on during them. Both men share a bias against war, war doctrine, conduct of belligerents, and moral explanations, which I had to recognize and understand before continuing in either work. At first glance a reader could think that both pieces are anti-war, and I’m not saying they aren’t. However, I consider it equally possible that the writers simply told their story the way it happened and that although they were not trying to write an anti-war book, because they published it to people who had mostly never experienced anything like what they did, the pieces come off as anti-war when the real purpose is to simply tell a true war story.