Its all a blur!

The movie Forrest Gump is one of the best story telling movies ever made. "When I was in China on the All-American Ping Pong team, I just loved playing ping-pong with my Flexolite ping pong paddle."(Zemeckis, 1994). All though a lot of the events in this story are fake, such as Gump's run on the Olympic ping-pong team, the story blends in with events that actually happened, blurring the line between fiction and reality. "I'm not a literary historian, I'm not a critic, I'm not a teacher. I spend my days, and a good many of my nights, writing stories" (O'brien). Obrien's quote from his speech sums it up perfectly. Not everything is historically accurate, but the way the storyteller sees it, it is told.

"The movie is ingenious in taking Forrest on his tour of recent American history" (Ebert). This movie was a perfect example of storytelling, just as O'brien's novel The Things They Carried was. His speech about storytelling is phenomenal in the regards that it is quite blunt that all his stories are not accurate or true. In one part he simply states you must believe what you want to believe. And in the story Forrest Gump, you want to believe everything. "Run Forrest, Run!" (Zemeckis, 1994).

Being able to blend the truth and fiction makes for a much better story, as it did in Forrest Gump. Usually history is boring, but seeing the twist the movie put on it made me enjoy history and realize what a turbulent time the late 50's and early 60's were in history. Every story you hear is not completely true and has some exaggeration in it. Every story you hear could not be interesting if it was not told differently then the way it actually happened.