O'Brien Response

Although his experience in the Vietnam War certainly changed his life and will always remain unforgettable, Tim O’Brien is right in saying that the essence of a person remains the same no matter what they go through in life. Ultimately, the only thing that changes is a person’s own perception, not the person themselves. Even if a person has an experience that truly changes nearly everything about them, such as O’Brien and his experience in Vietnam, that change only applies from that point forward. Since one cannot change his or her past, they essentially remain the same person forever, with their life events and perceptions being the things that do change.
Despite the fact that I have never gone through something nearly as extreme as O’Brien did in fighting the Vietnam War, even I can say that I have always been the same person, despite how different my perspectives have become over the past several years. Before I entered high school, my outlook on the world as well as my personality were completely different from what they are today. I believed that there was nothing I could ever do that could be considered wrong, and nothing in life was to be taken too seriously. I knew this was not just something that young teenagers feel as a result of being that age, because the people I looked up to for this reason were well into adulthood, and they too had the same attitude as I did. I believed at that point that all consequences were short-lived, and nothing would ever present me with a difficulty as far as moving on from it. However, around the time I began high school, I made some decisions that I still think about to this day, and I still question why I made them and even whether or not I regret them now. The events of the previous three years could not have been more different from what I had expected prior to that, but even today I do not feel I am any different as a person. Knowledge gained from experience does not equal permanent change from one person to another new person.
Because one will always remember how they used to be, they will, in essence, never change completely. Even though their feelings about a vital situation may have been even the opposite of how they feel about it looking back on it, this is simply a change in perspective, not a change in person. For example, before O’Brien left to go to war, he saw himself as a coward “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war” (61). But even decades later as he tells the story, he still remembers that this is exactly how he felt at that point in his life. After all that had happened between the time he left and went to war and the time he wrote The Things They Carried, he obviously does not feel the exact same way about life as he does now, but the important thing is that he does realize that these are the things that made up his life, and he still, forty-three years later, feels they are important enough to tell now. A person is not simply made up of what they are now, but rather they are made up collectively of everything they have ever been, no matter how different the past is from the present.

Angela's Ashes

During my childhood I never had the opportunity to write as I spent most of my younger years acting as the man of the household since my father went to England when I was a boy or even just trying to survive day to day. I write now for the opportunity to express what I never got to tell anyone for fear of either being thumped so hard on the head I flew into the wall or having the door of the church slammed in my face once again and this time for good. I write not for the sake of earning money for I have lived so long so deeply in poverty that I am used to how it feels to have nothing. I have written many threatening letters before as a way to earn enough to make ends meet for my family in the absence of my father and I no longer wish to use my writing for that same purpose. The only thing I ask for now is for the story of my family but most especially my mother and I to be heard. My mother must have gone through the hardest time of us all while we were growing up and God bless her even though I know about how she sinned those nights at Laman Griffin's loft and never confessed them to the priest. By my writing maybe I can take that burden of sin from her so it does not remain inside her for the rest of her life going untold. I also write for her to express the years of pain and suffering she faced with her family disappearing before her very eyes with my father drinking the dole money and then leaving us for England never to send a shilling home. Her only daughter's life taken from her before her baptism, her twin boys succumbing to the pneumonia, her husband and her son off to the army, and her oldest boy out of school and off to work before leaving to America. I write for her to tell her all these things that I kept in my head for so long as a boy and to let her know that I understand her suffering. I never showed her this before as a boy because it was at that time in my life when I needed to be the strongest and scrape together a living for myself and for her and for my younger brothers. I write because I never had the heart to complain then. Yes my life was miserable in Limerick and yes I was faced with eye disease and sin and poverty for many years. But I had more than some of my siblings got to have. I was alive and had more potential to move up in the world than anyone else including my mother and father. I write now because I am grateful for where I ended up after leaving behind what I lived with in Ireland. I write now because for the first time in my life, I can.