How Does Tim O Brien Use Story Telling In The Things They Carried

Storytelling has such a large impact on all stages of life. Stories are told to teach a lesson, give hope, or get someone through a hard time. Tim O’Brien uses storytelling in his book, The Things They Carried, to teach lessons from war, and help readers understand about the baggage people bring to war. The publisher section of this novel has this warning in it, "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life all incidents, names, and characters are imaginary” (O'Brien). This forewarns the reader that they could be reading something that is real or something that is completely made up. O’Brien is a masterful writer who has created an unique story about the experience of war through his style of writing.

Using this character he shows in fiction what he does in his real life, which is to write stories for people to understand. In an interview with Jeffrey Brown from PBS Newshour, O’Brien explains how fiction can tell the truth:
For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling. It’s one thing to watch a newscast or read a newspaper or a magazine article, where things are fairly abstract. In fact, the word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story. When I have a book I enjoy, I’m partly in the book. I’m not just observing

He purposely started off the book this way so that there would be a distinct connection between the people and the stories. This connection is not as vague as a run of the mill war novel that connects the people, places, and battles they fought. Instead this seems more like a peek into the minds of these soldiers, we get a sense of how they felt and what they were going through. In one chapter, O’Brien talks about stories. He states, "Stories are for joining the past to the future. 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". (O'Brien 38) O’Brien uses his stories to reach his audience. There are generations of people who have no clue what war is really like, whether it is because of our misconceptions based on what media portrays or the fact that there are people who have not served in the military. Some people might know about Vietnam and know the outcome of the war, but they don’t have the experience and real life understanding of how that story ended. They might not be able to fully understand the feelings of a soldier. Using characterization devices, O’Brien makes it clear exactly how these men are feeling so that the reader gets that understanding as