They Carried

To be honest, I’m not up to speed on, The Things They Carried, but I hope to be able to get caught up by Tuesday. Now, with that being said, I’m basically just going to share my thoughts on what we’ve talked about in class and what I’ve read up to now.
Probably one of the most interesting things I’ve ever come to a realization of is what we talked about in class on Friday. I never thought about it this way before, but It is so true that sometimes, something that is not the truth, can be more true than the truth itself. When we first talked about this, I was a little upset, because I thought the idea was ridiculous, because after all, how can something that’s not true be truer than the truth? Anyway, as we went on to explore the subject, I realized that the answer to this question was that the “story” that one may be telling, can be more true than truth itself because of the emotions it can convey.
In, how to tell a true war story, the narrator says, “a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth…A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The narrator goes on to tell a “not true” story and claims it is truer than the true war story because of the emotions it conveys. In other words, probably a lot of these stories aren’t necessarily true, however they capture the truth better than the “true” story would capture it.
In summation, The Things They Carried contains the theme of “truth vs untruth, or stories” that convey to the reader more truth than one could get out of any “factual” Vietnam War history book.

postmodernism

I don’t know if I can actually define postmodernism in one blog post, because there are so many different aspects of it. Anyway, I guess I’ll just talk about a few. Absent Centers, Deconstruction, Self Awareness, Truth, Grand Narratives and many other pieces combine to make this, “postmodern theory.” Centers, or central ideas that people base their way of living off of are highly discouraged in this theory. In other words, the postmodern thinker would have one to believe that there is no one correct way to live, and that nothing should be forced upon you. Who’s to say that there is one right way to talk for example? Who’s to say that southern dialect or “gangsta” isn’t acceptable? The ridding of this center opens the minds of people and allow people to become more accepting of one another. Then we have deconstruction, where defining it breaks its own rules. What I mean to say is that deconstruction is all about breaking things down to their base, to say that nothing is “right,” and nothing is “wrong.” In MAUS II, we learned all about self awareness. Art Spiegelman recognized that what he was writing was a comic book, and not anything else. He didn’t try to represent the absolute truth, just one persons perception of it. And Grand Narratives, pretty much when someone comes up with an idea that can account for a lot of things. I don’t really agree with a lot of postmodern theory, but I do agree with some of it, and I’m glad to have widened my way of thinking, and expanded my knowledge of the subject. I can see why Mr. D is against grades and scantron tests and what not, since I too think that a lot of subjects cannot consist of the whole truth, but instead one’s perception of it, such as history.