Simile

In the third chapter, Spin, almost immediately O'Brien uses a simile. He states, "On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put a fancy spin on it, you could make it dance." I have never been one to participate in Ping-Pong; as a result, this took me rereading the paragraphs before this simile a few times and asking my mom what she thought it meant before I fully grasped what O'Brien meant. At first read, I thought he meant one could make the war into whatever they wished if they spun their memories, like politicians spin stories for their candidates. My mom said that I was on the right track. Her point of view was that O'Brien was adding to his very first sentence of the chapter "The war wasn't all terror and violence." My mom believed that just like there are multiple ways to hit a Ping-Pong ball, there are many different ways to see the war. As we talked about it, we concluded that the writer would have made lifelong friendships created by the bonds only hard times make, the author would have learned about himself as a person and he surely grew in his experiences. The stories surrounding the simile only further prove that the war was not all fear; O'Brien recalls memories upon memories that have both bad and good entwined.