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Storytelling In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

553 Words3 Pages

Every day of our lives we are faced with the opportunity to believe and tell many tales, whether true or false, and exaggerations of daily events. Life is almost like a game of cards, we’re all given cards and it’s up to us to decide what, when and how we’re going to play them. Tim O'Brien uses the theme of storytelling in his book, The Things They Carried, to teach lessons from the war, and allow us to understand the baggage that he along with his fellow men carried. When storytelling the main idea is to connect people to the stories being told and the past to the future. Though O’brien offers several examples of storytelling, there are a select few that stick out. In the chapter, Spin, O’Brien says,"Stories are for joining the past to the future. …show more content…

By saying,” Stories are for...when you can’t remember”,he’s telling us that it’s the purpose of storytelling is to bring up the old memories, allowing you to have perspective.The chapter Spin was mainly focused on the stories of all O'Brien's’ military friends, and what things they did or what happened to them. Stories such as, Ted Lavender adopting a puppy, Kiowa teaching Kiley and Jensen the rain dance, and Curt Lemon dying, then hanging in pieces from a tree. Tim connects the past to his future and how he got where he is now through the stories he still tells. O’Brien is seemingly able to describe and remember each person, through just his memory and the process of telling Kathleen. Tim's’ daughter thinks that he is just obsessed with his past and needs to try to get over the past, what she doesn’t realize is he’s only trying to connect his past to his future and get her to understand and see what he had experienced. Tim does a good job in identifying his former friends for Kathleen by connecting them to his war

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In this story O’Brien changes his memories from war into something different, because it is so hard to tell a true war story. For an example in pages 118-128, Tim told a story about how he threw a grenade just to scare away a young enemy soldier. Tim ended up killing the kid.

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“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83). The theme of “happening-truth” versus “story-truth” is a constant opposition Tim O’Brien uses to convey his “true war story” to his audience. Many times in the book The Things They Carried, O’Brien lies to the reader to attempt to give the reader realistic events, so they can relate to the emotions O’Brien felt during the Vietnam war. O’Brien makes it clear in the chapter “Field Trip” that a person who has not been to war cannot comprehend what it was like. He uses a fictional character, Kathleen, to be a stand in for the reader; she is innocent and free from the burden of serving in wartime.

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In The Things They Carried O’Brien shows us that telling stories are essential for life because they help us remember and relive those moments that we cherish the most, or imagine a moment and make it into a moment that we desire. O’Brien shows how stories are essential for life throughout the story. One example is In The Lives of the Dead O’Brien talks about a moment of his childhood. He talks about a date that he went on with Linda. In this chapter O’Brien says, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others dream with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head.

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