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Summary Of How To Tell A True War Story By Tim O Brien

Decent Essays

Tim O’brien, an American novelist, has a complex, but creative meaning in his story “How To Tell a True War Story”. My interpretation of the story is that the person telling a story has the power to create the connection between the reader's opinion, emotion, and the story being told. Throughout the text O’brien proves this by making statements to support his claim, but then contradicts himself afterwards. In this story O’brien uses a war story because of the conflicting information giving from the story and what actually had happened. To make a connection between the reader's opinion and the story Tim O’brien uses examples of what he is trying to interpret within the story. Starting off the story he states “This is true” (O’brien 67), later …show more content…

Stanley Fish’s “How To Recognize a Poem When You See One” explains how our interpretations, and perspective is influenced by multiple things such as culture, the way we were taught, and our beliefs. With his story he goes into detail about how and why we make the decisions we make while reading a piece of literature. After reading his story, reflecting on it, I was about to use the ideas of Stanley Fish to evaluate how and why I came up with my interpretation of O’brien’s story. I decided what means what in the story based on the pattern and word choices that were used in the story. For a large amount of the story O’brien makes a statement, tells a story, then he makes another statement that is either a new idea, supporting the previous statement, or contradicting it. I took note of what each paragraph talked about and the most important information in each, which helped me make sense of what I was reading. Highlighting key words within the text helped me tell the main idea that he was trying to get …show more content…

A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (O’brien 78), is the point where I believed the story’s meaning lies in the actual story. The reason is, O’brien talks about a feeling that is created after hearing the story. This feeling is an indicator that the story and emotions had a link that went hand to hand with one another. It supports the idea that how a story is told can influence a person’s opinion and or emotion regarding the story. In the end the meaning does lie within your head, but is created based off of what is said in the

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