BLOG POST 5

I agree with the narrator when he says "..this too is true: stories can save us." When someone experiences something as dramatic as war there are some burdens that will stay with them for life. Sometimes to escape the pain, and hurt of the nightmares remembering the good stories, or the moral of the stories will save a persons mood. And we must not forget the lessons that men learn in war. They can bring those lessons home in the form of stories and share them with the people who need them the most.

When the narrator tells us that the story truth is sometimes truer than the happening truth he is talking about the experience, the moral, the lesson. Often when something happens for real it is an experience to you, but you may not realize the meaning of the experience until you tell the story for yourself. And since in war stories one must embellish it with small details that may or may not have actually happened, you can add anything to it to get your point across. So the experience in your story is sometimes more understandable that the real experience.

The last chapter "The Lives Of The Dead" is a great way to end this novel. This story is about a young girl who has a tumor and is humored by trickery's in a war movie. Her death I think gives a whole new meaning to the novel. While not everyone understands war in its most literally defined sense because they have not experienced it first hand, everyone has a war. For this young girl her war was fighting the tumor. It makes the entire book as a whole real to the reader because comparing the stories of the soldiers to the story of this ordinary girl we are able to better understand why the soldiers acted the ways that they did.