I confidently walked into English
class feeling prepared to discuss The Things They Carried. Little did I know
that every single assumption I made about Tim O’Brien was completely wrong. The characters. The experiences. Nothing truly
happened. But it was all still true. I still felt empathy for the characters
and I still felt that I understood the pains and struggles of “Tim O’Brien”.
I still perceived the novel
to be true. Why does O’Brien find it so easy to affect our perspective on war?
The answer is because people on the home front have no clue what war actually
is which is why it’s so easy to affect our view on war.
According to the philosopher and
emperor Marcus Aurelius, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.
Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth”. Everything we have heard
about war is from a movie, the news, or from other people. We have no
preconceived notion of our own when it comes to war because no one in our 11 AP
class has experienced it (I’m assuming). O’Brien could have said that war is
the greatest thing on Earth and “War is fun”(O’Brien 76) and we would still
believe him just because we have no idea about what war is really like.
According to Dictionary.com, perception means, “to become aware of, know, or
identify by means of senses”. Yet this definition is false because perception
doesn’t mean are truly aware of something. It just means we are seeing or listening to a
second-hand experience.
I really liked your introduction at the beginning. I felt the same way when entering English class, but, like you, I saw everything I thought to be true demolished. In addition, you bring up a very good point about human experiences with war; because none of us really know what war is like, our perception of it is colored by the experiences of others.
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