Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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

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