In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien constructs a seemingly autobiographical yet ostensibly fictional story of the war in Vietnam and its effects on a platoon of American soldiers. O’Brien’s inclusion of fact within fiction strengthens the rhetoric of the individual stories in The Things They Carried while leaving readers to question the overall truthfulness and validity of the stories. The members of the American platoon also question plausibility when struggling to grasp the credibility of Rat Kiley’s story of his first assignment near the Song Tra Bong river. Kiley describes his time in the Chu Liu mountains when a young medic named Mark Fossie decides to bring a girl named Mary Anne to the camp to demonstrate the camp’s lack of safety. …show more content…
Although captivating, many aspects of Kiley’s story stand out as implausible to the members of the platoon and to the readers of O’Brien’s book. Although bizarre and fantastical in nature, Kiley’s story is not less compelling as a result. The implausible aspects of Kiley’s story actually increase the story’s allure by imparting readers and listeners with an indecision about the story’s plausibility, thus increasing the readers’ interests. For instance, Mitchell Sanders says, “The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened” (O’Brien 102). Sanders’ interest in the story shows the irrelevance of truth in relation to the story’s