War & Peace Quote by Studs Terkel

Terkel is taking a swing at the tyranny of the “representative experience.” The archive of American storytelling is stuffed with voices claiming to stand in for everyone: the soldier, the working woman, the Black man, the white man. By repeating “What’s it like?” he mimics the well-meaning curiosity that powers so much reportage - and quietly exposes its trap. That question can be an invitation to empathy, but it can also be a way of turning living people into tour guides for someone else’s understanding, flattening history into a consumable vibe.

The intent is diagnostic. Terkel is pointing to a default mode in publishing and journalism: converting power, war, labor, and race into a set of “takes” that can be sampled, compared, and filed away. His examples aren’t random. Normandy is the canonical American trauma-turned-myth; “a woman having a job for the first time” signals a society that treated women’s public lives as an exception; “black or white” names the country’s oldest forced category system. He’s sketching how institutions keep asking for the same kind of narration - experiential, personal, legible to outsiders - while dodging deeper questions about who gets to define the terms.

Context matters: Terkel built his career on oral history, letting ordinary people speak with minimal authorial ventriloquism. The subtext here is a defense of multiplicity. Not one “what’s it like,” but a chorus that refuses to resolve into a single moral. He’s warning that curiosity without structural attention is just another form of control.