Our narrator is Tim O'Brien, an 21 year old who was unlucky enough to be drafted into the pointless Vietnam War. He was the average American 21 year old who was trying to get into college and get through a job. He enters the war terrified; so terrified in fact, that he tried to escape to Canada to flee the draft. He meets a man, Elroy Berdahl, who changes his whole outlook. He explains it on page 54, how it felt, "Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did" (O'Brien)? Inside O'Brien was torn with a decision. Elroy knew what O'Brien was doing near the border and had planned to get him across, but Tim could never bring himself to do it because of the shame he felt and the shame he feels he would bring to his community. Yet he also doesn't want to go to war and die. He wants to be strong and make his own decision, but instead he believes his cowardice made him go to the war. However, I disagree, O'Brien was a great person and I thought of him as a great person throughout the entire book. He was capable of being sensitive and morbidly honest, and the only reason the readers can understand the suffering of war is because of him. His fate of being drafted provided him with the knowledge to realize what each soldier goes through in each war. O'Brien also possessed the strength to grit his teeth and push through the war.
O'Brien also experienced many tragedies in war and life. When he was a boy he lost his friend Linda and developed a coping strategy. Then he experienced the deaths of Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, and the man he killed. He developed coping methods for the tragedies he witnessed. One is his book writing, he only writes war stories, according to his daughter. He states, " But this too is true: stories can save us. I'm forty three years old, and a writer now, and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon..."(O'Brien 213). He admits his book writing can't cope with everything. His whole experience he hoped never happened but yet he was part of something that no one else can explain to us. He showed us on page 213-215 when they killed that old man, how some people react to creepy, deathly, incapable things. Tim showed us a world that is repressed by many and not explained at its full capacity. The realistic ways of coping with the dead.
Tim O'Brien, our narrator and author chose himself because it was his story. He tells us a true war story that has none of the heroic "BS" that the other stories possess. O'Brien wanted everyone to catch the morbid reality that was his life. O'Brien says," If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie" (65). His perspective is true but in his own way. He may not be exactly precise, there may be some exaggerated truth, but it's truth. That is how the narrator's perspective changes the story. There is more detail and dimension to every morbid reality in the war.
My opinion of the narrator is true to him. He is a special human thrown into hell on Earth. O'Brien's capability of looking at everything and then showing the world through words is terrifyingly beautiful. He was able to tell us about a terrifyingly beautiful thing: war. War is terrifying, destructive, and ecstatic. O'Brien is still a good person because of his ability to tell the world of the atrocities that humans can commit against each other. He realized instead of violently beating his family or being a drunk, he could deal with his trauma through books and writing. He used his experience for good and to help the world be a better place.
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