I Have No Mouth and I Must Caffeine

"Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes" is objectively a short story. It is framed as such, written in prose, and contained within a collection of short stories. It has characters, dialogue, plot (not a lot but definitely not none), and has a beginning and end. And yet a lot of the things we take for granted in a short story are lost. Look at the first line: "When the phone rang, the gray-haired man asked the girl, with quite some little deference, if she would rather for any reason he didn't answer it" (Salinger 111). No exposition: we are dumped in the middle of a situation with no context. No knowledge of who's there: the characters aren't named, rather they are described. Throughout the entire story, in fact, rather than giving us detailed descriptions of the characters thoughts or backgrounds or anything really, Salinger gives us these actions. The story is told through actions and dialogue. Does that remind you of anything? "Pretty Mouth and Green

In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried , we have a very intimate and personal connection with the author.  O'Brien tells us every vivid detail of the stories, often multiple times. He doubles back on stories to give us new information, and each story includes copious amounts of background. Beyond that he presents a very meta discussion of the short story as a form and engages with us as an author writing a piece of fiction. In the book, O'Brien presents us with all the "facts", everything that happened to the characters, everything about them, as an attempt to convey some bigger "truth", some emotional goal. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", J. D. Salinger attempts a slightly different approach. The story opens with a paragraph or two of exposition. It conveys to us that we are in a hotel full of businessmen, and we are following a character, called simply "a girl", as she waits in her room for her call to be put through. We

In The Things They Carried , Tim O'Brien plays with our concept of truth. To O'Brien, truth is something entirely different than fact. He sets this up partially in "How to Tell a True War Story", in which he states that "Absolute occurence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth" (O'Brien 80). Nothing exemplifies this dichotomy between truth and fact better than O'Brien's stories about the shit field on the banks of the Song Tra Bong. The field is an extremely important moment in The Things They Carried , with a full three stories dedicated to it over a five story section of the book. It starts off with "Speaking of Courage", which first brings our attention to the field. "Speaking of Courage" introduces the horrors of being stuck in a shit field where Kiowa drowns and the main character of this story, Norman Bowker, fails to save him. This story is inter