Spin- Chapter 3

My favorite part of this chapter is the simile. It ties in the title and it just makes sense. Which is rare in this book. "On occasions, the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance" (p. 31). This chapter consists of a whole bunch of small stories. Some are sad some are happy. O'Brien does a good job of balancing a bad story by throwing in a good one right after. When he talks about the sadness of the boy with one leg then he tells a funny story about Sanders and his lice. There are a lot more like this to follow. Another peaceful story about a man and a nurse, then a rain dance and the gruesome buffalo. These stories are told to show the depth of the war and how it is not just shooting and bloody battle.

I really like the last paragraph of this chapter. O'Brien goes into the importance of stories. "Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story" (pg. 36) This makes a lot of sense to me. Stories connect us to what we can not live out but need to understand.