Story Telling

When reading The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s excerpt about storytelling was the section of the novel that grabbed my attention the most. This was because to me, it linked almost directly to how the use of rhetoric can influence a speaker’s meaning. O’Brien notes that “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.” He suggests that other war stories, however uplifting and inspiring they may sound, are not the “true” way to tell the stories. This is justified when O’Brien states that "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." He’s trying to tell us that, sometimes fiction is the only route to communicate certain emotions to others, and that sometimes the real events, when told, betray the true feelings felt in the heat of the moment. This relates to rhetoric because it tries to hook the audience emotionally, not by using the logical facts, but instead “molding” the truth to allow the audience to attempt to live vicariously through his own experiences.