Post#2 Placing Stories Into Their Own Category or Genre

What makes a “war” story a “war” story? Many would say shootings with blood and intestines sticking out, with a story of two groups conflicting with one another. This is what is expected when reading stories about war. In O’brien’s stories “Spin”, “The Man I Killed”, and “Good Form” he speaks of his own internal conflicts within a war. His stories are not about killing and gore, but how people lives were personally affected by war. Such as when O’brien writes about the young fellow who was killed in “The Man I Killed”; The young man was killed in an act of war but instead of focusing on the fact that they were in war, O’brien focused his thought on how this man managed to end up in the war, and what he did that got him there. You begin to discover that he was a lover, not a fighter. He actually hated the war but felt like he was obligated to be a part of it because of his family’s pride. He loved math and had a lot of good things going for him. He came into the war knowing that it was all over and that he was dead. Now there he is dead with his body teared apart. In a sense O’brien was at a war with himself because he just stole a life, and is reflecting on what could have been, and twenty years later he still has that memory in his head. “What stories can do make things present, I can look at things I never looked at” You can translate this quote from “good form” and take it anyway you’d like. For example take any experience in your life, and reflect about it or even write it down, you may find yourself noticing things you have never noticed before about the situation and yourself. After extracting the true meaning behind O’brien’s stories should they be categorized as war stories? Is it a story about war, or a story about self-conflict? Well Chandler says that Genre can “help readers to identify and interpret texts” but in also “constrains the possible ways in which a text is interpreted”. In other words considering O’brien’s stories to be categorized as war stories can take out the true meaning behind them. Foucault talks about how the Chinese encyclopaedia puts things into categories of their own; in a sense that O’brien’s stories should have a category or genre of their own. When people read or see a War story they expect to see a lot of blood and action, not so much personal issues.