T and T = T
F and F = F
T and F = F
…
It drove me crazy! (Does that mean I’m an illogical person? I think not.)A true statement and another true statement, when put together, always generate a true conclusion. Fine, that makes sense. But on the other hand, who decided whether those statements were true? By this virtue, we can ascertain that truth is rather a subjective rather than an objective matter (and thus its definition is also). What could be true to me is not always true to you, and what is true for her is not always true for him. So when asked about what the “truth” is in O’brien’s “How to tell a True War Story” it is rather difficult to provide a concise answer. In any case, my attempt to answer such question is as follows: The “truth” about telling a true war story is that it is most likely untrue. What I just said contradicted itself right? Well I think that was part of the point O’Brien was trying to make. War is full of contradictions, the biggest of which O’Brien explained quite brilliantly:
At its core, perhaps, war is just another word for death, and yet any
soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings
with it a corresponding proximity to life…you’re never more alive than when
you’re almost dead
Because of the contradictions of war and the confusion it brings us as third party viewers, we tend to analyze it to make sense of it. And because we analyze it, it’s no longer a true war story. Why? Because it’s not what the story did to you but what you got from the story. We always come to the conclusion that war was horrible and to justify its horridness, we insert a certain sense of morality to war. But as O’Brien puts it, war isn’t just hell,
...it’s just the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure
and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and
love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery”. War makes
you a man; war makes you dead.
1 comment:
totally agree with you man i think we should just take the story for what it is; amazing. Not try to anylize if its tru or not because in the end who truly knows except the people that were there or that werent? if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it does it make a noise? did it even fall at all? Chandler really frustrated me with asking us if we though if it was true or no, she made me misrable. but you gotta admit it is a great story. But is it true hahahahaha.
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