Fiction Analysis Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

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Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Tim O’Brien’s, “How to Tell a True War Story” focuses on teaching his subjects on how both to tell a true war story and how to know if a war story is true. To him, a “true” war story is not essentially real or rather actual. Tim’s guide portrays a true war story as not precise, that is, it is an ever continuing story. Besides, the story is contradictory and embarrassing. The most surprising thing about a true war story is that has an extreme fidelity to obscenity and evil. The story is majorly defined and put into context by the storyteller (Calloway, Catherine., 255).
Yet in another story, I am the Grass by David Walker, he narrates his experience in the war. David came back home from the war in the year 1968. Into his first week of stay, he feels the guilt for his actions. Some of which he is ashamed to talk about – even to the wife. From the story, we can deduce the assumption that he tries to detach himself as the soldier in Vietnam from the person he is present. He believes that “him” during the war and Vietnam were bad “persons.” His shame is well told in the first paragraph of the story when he writes, “I cannot tell my thirteen-year-old that once …... I took a girl her age into a thatched-roof hooch in Tay Ninh City and did her on a bamboo mat. I cannot tell my wife …. that on a search-and-destroy mission I emptied my M-60 machine gun into two beautiful white egrets that were wading in the muddy water of a paddy.” That is a pure expression of guilt and disgust with one’s self.
Tim’s fictional narration of his personal experiences in the Vietnam war takes the first person point of view. This first-person perspective writing of a horrible death of an acquaintance is the instance Tim uses to show his theme of not being able to illustrate a true war story. Through telling several different stories and merging them into a common theme, the author applies an interesting literary skill – all to prove his point (Calloway, Catherine., 256). The several different accounts of the primary event in his stories illustrate how difficult it is to both narrate a war story while managing all the expressions the story tags along. The interjection with each retelling narrates different or rather extra war stories, thus, confirming the difficulty in telling a true war story.
On the other hand, Ernest Hemingway, through his short story - “Soldier's Home” tells a whole different story. The plot involves Harold Krebs as the main character. Krebs is a young soldier who has come back home following world war one. He is not at peace with both his past and current life experiences. He is unable to come to terms with the fact that nothing much has changed since he left home. Actually, so many things build up his mind. Harold comes back to his parent's house and finds the car he left in the driveway unmoved. Even the girls have not changed except that they now keep short air. What hits him most is that people back at home are not excited about the soldiers coming back at home since other soldiers had returned long before and the excitement has escaped the peopl...