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Power Of The Narrator In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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The Power of the Narrator Truth is not what was seen or heard or happened, but what was felt. It can neither be generalized nor objectified because it is unique to the person who experiences it. The author’s best option to make the story feel true for the reader is to make it relatable to them by using the narrator. For the reader to relate to the story most, the narration of the story should alter depending on the content of the story. Tim O’Brien focuses on the relationship between narration, truth and feeling in his compilation of stories called The Things They Carried. He uses storytelling from various points of view in order to illustrate that a story can be defined as true only if it gives the reader a feeling of truth. The best choice …show more content…

An example of this situation appears in O’Brien’s short story called “In the Field”. It is a story of soldiers looking for their friend’s corpse in the muck and it is narrated by the third person point of view. Two sentences from the first paragraph of the story are “Kiowa was gone. He was under the mud and water, folded in with the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to someplace dry and warm” (155). These two sentences make the reader aware of the narrator’s point of view while explaining the reasons for that. Showing the situation and introducing the narrator are important by means of awareness of the perspective. The thought of finding and digging out a corpse, especially if it’s a friend’s corpse, from the mud is not relatable for most- almost none- of the readers. The very low possibility of being in this kind of a situation tells the author that it is harder for the reader to relate to the story. If the story was told in the first person narrator, it would be harder for the reader to emphasize with the narrator and understand his/her feelings. Therefore writing it from the perspective of a third narrator rather than the first narrator makes it easier for the reader to believe that the story is

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