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Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brian raises questions about how fiction can be more truthful than facts. The book contains many short stories about Vietnam told by different perspectives. The author creates characters that seem very real based on personal experiences. These characters tell graphic stories about the war making the book seem real. O’Brian creates a rich story by exaggerating details in order to get the reader to try and be able to feel how he experienced the war. The author goes into great detail to make the reader fully understand all of the horrible things that happened in Vietnam. Everything is so believable, it’s hard to distinguish what is real and what is not real. For example, in one of the stories Tim tells the story of how he killed a man on a trail. O’Brian goes into great detail about the moments leading up to the death and all of the gruesome details of the body afterwards. He explains to the reader his feelings after what had happened to try and connect with the reader and make them feel the way he had. In actuality that story did not …show more content…

He goes back to one of the places where he lost one of his friends. His daughter asked him while they are there if he had ever killed anyone before. Thinking back to the incident where he had killed the man on the trail, O'Brien explained to her that he had. The author is asked in an interview if that story actually had happened and he responded that he did not go back to Vietnam with his daughter, he did not even have a daughter, O’Brien explained how he added this story in there because he needed someone to ask such a simple question of if he had killed anyone, to make a stronger impact on the reader. However he needed a child to ask the question as supposed to an adult because an adult would never ask that type of question. The child asking it made the story seem more

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In this story O’Brien showed the effects war can have on a soldier after they’ve served. Just like the first chapter, this chapter is also told in third person, “O’Brien” is largely absent from this chapter. Once Norman returned home all he could ever think and talk about was his experiences from the war, he became a part of Vietnam. When Norman returns home he starts driving his father’s Chevy pickup around the lake, doing circles. All his thoughts consisted of the same thing, past people in his life and how they seemed to change.

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Why does Tim O’Brien only Share Fictional War Stories? How many times have you read a fact, but never truly connected to it? You probably didn’t have the emotional sense that you would have had if you were to read those facts, but in a story outline. Tim O’Brien expresses his experience in the Vietnam War, not by listing off facts, but by writing a fictional story so the readers can understand and feel the emotional connection. When someone reads a history book, it’s dull because it has bunch of facts without a detailed description.

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This event in the story changes Tim O’Brien’s look at war and his time in Vietnam because he can’t believe that he was able to bring himself to kill another human being. It was so hard for him to accept this truth because in the beginning of the story, Tim enters the war as a scared and innocent man who felt like he would have been shamed if he didn’t enter. He was scared of dying and seeing the killing of other innocent people. Because of O’Brien’s past of being scared of war and not wanting to enter, this fueled his anger and sadness after he killed another soldier. This was not something O’Brien stood behind, and he was very ashamed of his actions.

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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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This primary source is useful to show his decisions and the cause and effect of them. Most primary sources don’t show an emotional factor that can connect to the readers and show how the war in Vietnam affected O’Brien and others both immediate and long term. The imagination factor that was used tells us that history can be told through stories that aren’t true. It ultimately showed the relationship between fiction and reality. The effects of the unreal stories shows the significance of O’Brien’s writing about his experiences in Vietnam.

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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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For example, he tells the story of Curt Lemon's death and proceeds to analyze and explain why it holds an element of truth. Ultimately, he surmises, "truth in a story is not necessarily due to 'factual' accuracy." Instead, if the story affects the reader or listener in a personal and meaningful way, then that emotion is the truth of the story. O'Brien tests these ideas by relating the stories that others told in Vietnam, like the story of a soldier who brought his girlfriend to Vietnam and grows more and more terrified as she becomes fascinated by the war and ultimately never returns home. The soldiers who hear the story doubt its truth, but are drawn into the story nonetheless, showing that factual accuracy is less important but emotions is kinda the big

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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.

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Craftsmanship of A Story During the 1917 October Revolution, Russia gave way to the Marxist Party in less than twenty-four hours. Russian citizens were dramatically affected by the overthrow, and it rippled throughout the world from Vietnam to Cuba to China as nations feared communism’s policies, its threat to sovereignty and to national security. In retaliation, wars waged and hostility grew. Fifty years after the October Revolution, the United States entered into a controversial war alleging to defend democracy. This war lead to conflict, violent protests, hostility, and a generation who questioned the military.

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In the chapter when he describes the man he kills, he talks about the state of the dead body by saying, “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien Chapter 11). This brutal and horrifying imagery displays an irrefutable element of truth to O’Brien’s writing. Not only does this imagery highlight the truth to his writing, but it also sheds light on the brutal truth about the war in Vietnam. By using imagery as such a strong rhetorical device in his writing, he gives the average person a taste of just how barbaric and cruel Vietnam felt for the people who experience the war first hand on either side of the fighting. Tim O’Brien gives a very detailed and intense description of his time fighting in Vietnam during their war with America.

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Each day we are faced with the opportunity to believe and tell many stories. when you were younger you were probably told stories about Saint Nick, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. As a kid, these stories serve a purpose to teach something and to give hope. As adults the stories ease the pain of a subject or to get us through a hard time. An example might be a mother that has lost a son in a tragic accident will never be told by the doctor that her son died in pain, but the doctor might say he died peacefully.

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Even after all these years, O’Brien is still unable to get the images of Vietnam out of him head, specifically of the man he killed. In the novel, he repeats the description of the man numerous times, almost to the point of excess, saying,“he was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole” (124).

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Plus, the issues that the book mainly digresses and discusses into, are the moral question of whether war is right or not and the psychological effects it has on its soldiers or those involved in it as mentioned by O’Brien himself in some of the chapters and the main conflict O’Brien has during the war is having difficulty dealing with the war itself either by the long-term effects or by the immediate effects of the war. O’Brien sees the effects that it had on his comrades of the war through his narration and talks about it himself about what he is doing really is helping or not and what he personally thinks of the war and the ordeal. The chapters in the novel are stories that O’Brien recalls from the time he spent during the Vietnam War that revolves around himself and the troops he was with and some key details to summarize this novel despite there ever being a plot, are that during the summer of the year 1968, O’Brien has an internal crisis with himself and has trouble choosing whether he wants to join and fight in the

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Tim O'Brien, an extremely talented and acclaimed writer of the award winning novel, The Things They Carried, has an extraordinary writing style, which seems to cloud the line between fact and fiction. He challenges his readers to consider more profound interpretations about truth and memory, and guides the readers closer to the center of the character’s experiences. The Things They Carried is not just a story about fighting in a war, but also about fighting the war going on inside one’s self. The book's dominant idea is just as pertinent today as it was many years ago; touching the hearts of all types of people from all different walks of life.

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He fought a war in Vietnam that he knew nothing about, all he knew was that, “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He realized that he put his life on the line for a war that is surrounded in controversy and questions. Through reading The Things They Carried, it was easy to feel connected to the characters; to feel their sorrow, confusion, and pain. O’Briens ability to make his readers feel as though they are actually there in the war zones with him is a unique ability that not every author possess.

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