On Thursday freshmen were highly advised, at least in my peer group, to attend Tim O’Brians speech. I was not motivated to attend, except for that fact that I could write this analysis and receive extra credit on Monday’s quiz. However, in the end I still felt disappointed with O’Brian’s performance.
The speech started off very slow, and his points at the beginning seemed extremely irrelevant, though he tied all his points together I felt it was done poorly. I personally could not hear very well and with the fidgeting of those around me and side conversations, it was very difficult to concentrate on O’Brian’s speech. Though I was not one who left early, I wish I could have.
I enjoyed the book, however the writing style was extremely repetitive and hard to fallow towards the end of the novel. I felt his speech was also scattered like his writing style, this I feel is extremely hard to fallow; I had a conversation with a fellow freshmen about this we both agreed this is why we only chose to read sections of the book. Otherwise it felt like we were reading the same chapter multiple times.
I knew when reading The Things They Carried that it was fictional novel, but while in my reading I did not feel like the stories were fictional. When O’Brian said some of the stories were not completely accurate, some were not even true, I was extremely disappointed because I do not feel that war is something that a soldier would twist in a novel. However, when he spoke about how one person views an event and another might will be different and will change over time I better understood how he wrote the book and why certain aspects needed to be portrayed in a specific way. Overall I am glad I attended because I better understood the book.
