The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

This is the book I cite and analyze in my RIP project and companion essay. It is a collection of short stories written by Tim O’ Brien, which is about a group of American soldiers in the Vietnam way. The use of real names and inclusion of himself as the protagonist within the book creates a style that meshes and blurs the fiction and non-fiction. It shows the pressure and pain the soldiers of the Vietnam War carried and try to cure their pain, which I call writing cure. As I says in the introduction essay, I like this book mostly for the title of double meaning. I also like its weighty topics and montages of writing. I remeber a chapter, he writes about the death of a soldiers for four different ways, from writing the reality to making death quite beautiful. The use of bluring the fiction and non-fiction is quite magic. I highly recommend this book.

Nothing But the Truth: A Documentary Novel by Avi

It’s both a documentary and modified epistolary style novel with diary entries, personal letters, school memos and transcripts of dialogue. The genre is kind of like Heart by the Italian author Edmondo De Amicis who was a novelist, journalist, writer and poet. It is a combination of diary by an elementary school students and meaningful stories.

Nothing But the Truth: A Documentary Novel tells the story of an incident in a New Hampshire town called Harrison where a boy is suspended from school for humming the United States National Anthem as well as the effects of this story receiving national publicity. The main theme of the novel is the subjectivity of truth and that while individual statements may be true, taken separately they may not give an accurate picture of an event.

Philip Malloy is a middling student who pays no attention on his study and blames his teacher about her poor grades. He disrespects his teacher and lies to others when he is asked to suspend from school. His teacher, Margaret Narwin is a responsible and patient teacher who cares about her students.

The author remains invisible in this novel, but the diaries and letters use first-person narration. The audience is all the people who blindly criticize something they don’t know the truth.