Cruelty And Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In war there is always going to be cruelty because the judgement of others is impaired, but will there always be truth? My definition of cruelty is any amount of suffering or pain causing done for pleasure. Truth to me is something that can be backed up with a fact or reality with absences of deception. Kant believes that cruelty to animals is justified in cases where the benefit to outweighs the harm to humans. Kant defines truth as a statement or belief that can be defended with facts. O’Brien has seen cruelty, and therefore his definition might be more violent based. Tim O’Brien believes that there are two types of truths, happening truths and story truths. A happening truth is the actual events that have happened. A story truth is the molding or reshaping of the truth to allow the story to be believable. In this essay I will be analyzing cruelty and truth based on the perspective of Kant and O’Brien and how they can also affect the decisions that people make. …show more content…
In the book The Things They Carried, O’Brien describes truth shown in two distinct ways. “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 thing that man have always done. If a story seems moral, don’t believe it.” I think that this shows one of the truths that O’Brien was talking about. His perspective is that if you hear a story with a good happy ending it's not true and true war stories come from cruelty and suffering. Kant argued, “moral law is a truth of reason.” I interpret this to mean that your morality is how you rationalize. He was trying to say that everyone has morals and you act on those morals. Morals are the foundation of a person's