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+\input mla8
+
+\numberfirstpage
+\name{Holden} \last{Rohrer}
+\prof{Jones}
+\clas{AP Lang}
+
+\header
+\title{The Old Woman in {\it How To Tell A True War Story}}
+
+{\it How To Tell A True War Story} is partially about the mental fog of
+war and mostly about the near-incomprehensibility of war to someone who
+hasn't experienced it. The old woman who comes up to O'Brien at the end
+of his telling of the war story acts as evidence of this kind of
+person's inability to get the absurdity of a war story by attempting to
+fit it into preexisting notions and storytelling archetypes---themes,
+morals, a parabolic narrative structure.
+
+The reason that O'Brien chooses this person as the stereotypical
+miscomprehender is because the ``kindly temperament and humane
+politics'' are too well thought out and at odds with the visceral
+understanding of the contradictory nature of war that O'Brien is asking
+of the reader. The abusive ``dumb old cooze'' phrase contributes as a
+warning against the reader to take a war story too literally or
+generalize or reason about these stories.
+
+His objective is making the reader understand that in the same way any
+of the stories he tells are pointless or wonderful or horrific, so is
+the war, and the book can't have a singular overarching theme except for
+self-contradiction. O'Brien makes a point of truth being separate from
+reality because visceral emotion is the only kind of information that
+can be shared if the basic assumption is true. Anger or frustration or
+awe are the same regardless of the story that contains them, and O'Brien
+wants the reader to remain at that basic level.
+
+\bye