The Terrible Beauty Analysis

The Terrible Beauty of the Forgotten War In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s, use of words to describe his memories of the Vietnam war transform the stories in his novel. O’Brien is able to take images of disturbing horror and turns them into a romanticized vision, that the reader can understand. Because this is a war story, it’s obvious there will be horrible images that O’Brien and his platoon had to experience, but he able to transforms them into beautiful narratives. Throughout the book, Tim O’Brien contradicts his memories of death and gore and transforms them into a beautiful romanticized version of events. I believe O’Brien writes with the intent to keep the awful events and memories of the Vietnam war alive, but written in a beautiful way the readers can still understand. In O’Brien’s book he writes, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.” pg.80. This exemplifies In the chapter, How to Tell a True War Story, O’Brien tells the story of Curt Lemon being blown up by a grenade The originally gorey scene transformed into an oddly beautiful …show more content…
He wrote a harrowing description of every detail describing the man he killed. O’Brien gave the man a made-up life to personify him and gave him a life. I think O’Brien did this because he wanted to feel the guilt and mourn him, it was almost like O’Brien intentionally wanted to make himself feel worse about what happened, he wanted to make himself into a victim. The difference between this man dying and one of his platoon members is that he didn't know this man and he did his fellow troops that had died. “His life was now a constellation of possibilities.” O'Brien's lack of knowledge about the man he killed incited a guilty curiosity, so he created a life and personality for the