D'Amore AP Lit

After hearing about the Vietnamese women who felt underrepresented while teaching TTTC because of the lack of Vietnamese characters in the book I thought that she was a little harsh on the author. I did not think it was fair of her to assume that a book meant to carry on the legacy of the author’s dead platoon mates needed to represent the Vietnamese people in good light. The purpose of the book was not to show how the people of Vietnam helped the Americans or how the war affected them, no this was a book written to immortalize O’Brien’s experiences in Vietnam along with making sure his dead friends were never truly dead by having their story continuously read and told so they are never forgotten. I do understand where she is coming from saying it is unfair to have to teach and listen to her colleagues talk about a book that makes her people seem like enemies. While her thoughts are fair, I do not think it was right of her to say that the book was making her uncomfortable literature is

The ending of TTTC appears to step away from the entire story leading up to it. We travel back in time before Vietnam to when O’Brien was a nine-year-old boy. He talks about the first time he ever witnessed a dead body as a young child. Tim finds himself having to cope with the loss of a girl he loved to a brain tumor. O’Brien goes into talking about how he dealt with the loss by using stories to bring her back to life and make it as though she was never dead. The final chapter talks about how death changed its definition over time as he saw more and more of it in the jungle of Vietnam. He starts to realize that a person never truly dies if their story continues to be told. Just as O’Brien keeps Linda alive through memory and storytelling, this entire book keeps those he lost in Vietnam alive as well. This made me second guess all the stories in the book because he told stories to keep people alive so how many of this platoon mates were actually alive and present for those actions an