Story Truth Vs. Happening Truth

This unit started off with the memoir The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and involved reading one of a selection of memoirs (for example, I read A Long Way Gone) independently and discussing them on nicenet. Throughout the unit we discussed the different concepts of truth, and how far you could stretch the truth before it became a lie. For example, we discussed how A Million Little Pieces author James Frey could have presented his novel as a fiction piece instead of a non-fiction memoir, and it would not have been as big of a scandal that he mislead many people into believing what he wrote actually happened. In this unit, we were all required to write our own personal memoir, based upon a picture from our past. The unit concluded with the fiction novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a war story loosely based upon O'Brien's own life. The sample analysis book for this unit description is similiar to O'Brien's in that aspect.

Brief Sample Analysis:
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms revolves around the life of Federic Henry, an american man working as an ambulence driver for Italy during WWI. The novel resembles Hemingway war experiences as They Things They Carried resembles Tim O'Brien's, however it is far from a memoir- and therefore what happened in the book does not need to be the same as what happened in Hemingway's actual life.
A Farewell to Arms is a war story that at its heart is very anti-war. Hemingway uses graphic descriptions of the injury scenes to take away any glamour that many previous war novels may have presented. The life of soldiers, or in the protaganists case- ambulence drivers- is shown as one which should be anythnig but idolized with the word choices that Hemingway makes. On the other hand, the relationship between Catherine Barkley and Henry is shown as rather casual and not as important until after Henry is injured and able to leave the battle field. This choice by Hemingway shows where the focus of his story lies, and it is a war story first, a love story after.