Week 8 Assigned Topic

I believe that O’Brien and Farrell both have very similar definition of what it takes to tell a story although they go about defining them in different ways. O’Brien’s incredibly direct explanation is more my style. I agree with both of these writers in that war stories and all stories for that matter are really about the human condition and feeling rather than just an explanation of what happened. Have you ever noticed how reading a police report is very different from reading a novel? This is because to tell a good story you have to describe not only what happened but how those occurrences affected the characters of those stories. Vietnam stories are about how the trauma of the war affected the people in it. A good war story should evoke emotion in the reader in a way that one could identify with the soldier even though they have never experienced anything close to what that solder went through. War stories should also entertain us. I know it sounds a little sick that stories about death and war can be entertaining but, they really are and that is why we read them.