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Metafiction In The Things They Carried

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Metafiction is a literary technique used by Tim O’Brien to frequently remind the readers of the fictional quality of his war stories and to emphasize the relations between fiction and reality. “Good Form” is an example of metafiction because it not only accounts for the reason why Tim O’Brien produces made-up stories—to deliver his personal feelings to the audience—but also makes the readers realize that The Things They Carried is a work of fiction, instead of a description of the reality. Tim O’Brien also applies metafiction to previous chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story”, and both chapters express the notion that feelings or morals are greater than facts. “Good Form” directly informs the readers about the author’s fabrication on the
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Tim O’Brien and Chris Kyle both use literary devices to contrast two different ideas of war. “There’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean.

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Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

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In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.

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(page 68). This is why Tim O’Brien writes the way he does. He wants the reader to believe his story and get a sense of what war is truly

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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).

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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, illustrates the experiences of a man and his comrades throughout the war in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien actually served in the war, so he had a phenomenal background when it came to telling the true story about the war. In his novel, Tim O’Brien uses imagery to portray every necessary detail about the war and provide the reader with a true depiction of the war in Vietnam. O’Brien starts out the book by describing everything he and his comrades carry around with them during the war. Immediately once the book starts, so does his use of imagery.

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Rather, the significance of O’Brien’s work is his utilization of a metafictional novel as a representative vehicle for the Vietnam War. Within The Things They Carried

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Just like the soldiers, we carry love, memories and grief of those who die in the war. The war also depicts the inhumanity involved in that, many commit evils and crimes in the name of war. Through the use of imagery, Tim O'Brien presents graphical descriptions of the reality of war. These descriptions form the lenses through which the reader sees and perceives the stories as the author

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A lot happens in Tim O 'Brien short story "The Things They Carried", at first, the reader speculates what the short story is about and why it is called "The Things They Carried". The narrator Tim O 'Brien tells and describes all the things that the men have to carry while "in-country" during the Vietnam War in the1960 's. The text 's artistic value comes from its plot, characters, conflict, and style. In the plot of the story the protagonist, Tim O 'Brien starts by describing circumstances that happened while he was in Vietnam. In the beginning of "The Things They Carried" we are introduced to each character by the things they carry.

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The things they carried is a novel by Tim O’Brien. About the Vietnam war. About the lives of people going there. It’s a collection of war stories. Some of them true, some of the untrue and that’s the main topic that’ll be discussed in this paper.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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The Things They Carried is a book that turns on a single realization: as part of imagining a return to Vietnam as home to engender a new way of reading and writing the world, distinctions disappear and the impossibility of separating experiences and stories, reality and the imaginary, into orderly categories transcends the desire for neatness and clarity. O’Brien’s postVietnam world is a confusing, ambiguous place. No hard and fast rules exist; truth is always provisional, waiting to adapt itself to the next story, the next reality. The Things Them Carried testifies to displacement as a complicated condition; the polyvalent and equivocal nature of its vision and its orientation transforms everything in its scope. As such, the careful detailing

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"They varied the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity." -O 'Brien. The Things They Carried by Tim O 'Brien, is about how war can destroy you, with an horrible end always. O 'Brien use the symbolism to show that war can destroy your humanity and innocence.

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There are numerous examples of metafiction in The Things They Carried; many are clear, and some are harder to notice at first glance. In the text, author Tim O’Brien uses a metafictional writing style to vividly illustrate what emotions and thoughts went through the minds of the soldiers fighting in Vietnam, including himself. It is unclear whether or not some of the stories he tells in the text actually happened, but there is no doubt that they are paramount to the underlying objective of O’Brien’s writing style: to use realistic scenarios that may not have actually happened, to make whatever changes necessary to the story to get his point across. Tim O’Brien uses metafiction to obscure the line between truth and fiction by manipulating details that trigger certain emotions to influence the reader. Metafiction allows writers like Tim O’Brien to manipulate what is held to be truth, and fabricate certain details in an attempt to enhance or reinforce the meaning of a story.

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