Tim O'Brien

There is always that one moment in your life when something really exciting epic or even sad, and demoralizing happens to you. Whatever that moment is whether it is embarrassing or exciting it follows you everywhere, like your shadow, because no matter what you do you will never forget it. It is engraved in your memory for as long as you live. Many people try to erase the memory with drugs and alcoholic beverages. Others cope with the memory by writing it in their dairy; or they write novels to share with others. This category of people is referred to as authors or writers. There are many authors that reveal their experiences in their literature. “Stories are for joining past and future…” (Calpoly, 1) is exactly what Tim O'Brien said regarding his book “The Things They Carried”, so we can infer that some of his past is revealed in his short story “Speaking of Courage.”

Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, but he did not live there for long. At the age of four, he and his family moved to Worthington. Worthington was not like New York City or Detroit because it was not even a city. Worthington was a small unpopulated area; it was a small town in Minnesota (Kaplan 1). As we all know there is not much to do in small towns, which is what justifies Tim O'Brien's remark about his hometown being boring (Calpoly, 1). Although O'Brien's hometown was small, it still had a massive impact on him (Kaplan 1). O'Brien mentions something about the “Kiwanis boys” in his short story “Speaking of Courage”. The “Kiwanis boys” also showed up in his biography. He said my “hometown was filled with the typical Kiwanis boys….” (Calpoly, 1). In the short story “Speaking of Courage” the main character Norman talks about how he would have someday told the Kiwanis club about his experiences in the war. The Kiwanis club may have been a club that Tim O'Brien participated in, or maybe it was a club that he wanted to participate in. Whatever the case was, the word Kiwanis seemed to be in both the book and his biography. Tim O'Brien may have change the saying in the book from “Kiwanis boys” to the “Kiwanis club”, but we can still say that whoever the “Kiwanis boys” are, they were taken from his past and cut into his short story “Speaking of Courage” (O'Brien, 144).

Tim O'Brien was an author that spent much of his time alone with his stories. He always went somewhere to sit down and write (Kaplan, 6). He was always thinking about his experiences in the war, but he never talked about them (Kaplan 4). The only way he expressed his wartime experiences was through writing his novels. In the short story “Speaking of Courage”; Norman, the main character throughout the entire book, was talking to himself. The only time he was not was when he went to a fast-food restaurant and actually talked to order his burger ...