Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War book, “The Things They Carried”, is a collection of stories set during and after the Vietnam War, from the perspectives of Tim and his comrades. One of those stories, The Man I Killed, details the aftermath of Tim’s first combat kill, switching between O’Brien’s comrades attempting to console him, and a young O’Brien creating an entire life story for his young victim, his guilt humanizing the dead man. As the narrative of this story grows, the definition of truth itself is brought into question. In war, facts alone can’t properly convey what it is like to live through such atrocities. Therefore, the survivors remember war through the emotions it produced (fear, guilt, anger, depression). When writing a war story for

When O’Brien reveals to the reader the major factual falsehoods in his story, he introduces the terms happening-truth, the factually accurate version of events, and story-truth, the fictionalized representations/alterations of common experiences which makes up nearly all of the book. Upon revealing the happening-truth of The Man I Killed, he says "There were many bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was too afraid to look…twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief" (O’Brien, 172). With that factual happening-truth told, his reasoning for choosing the story-truth is much clearer. The happening-truth, while factually accurate, does not capture the experiences of being in war as well as the story truth does. When O’Brien actually faced the corpses, he avoided seeing the truth of those moments, and therefore the happening-truth was insufficient. However, O’Brien could not escape the raw emotions of guilt and depression that he carried from those events, so he used the story truth to create representations of those specific emotions that all soldiers felt. As O’Brien said himself, "I want you to feel what I feel. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth" (TTTC, 171). The logos accuracy of a war story cannot always capture the

Tim O’Brien established that these emotional depictions of war must match the evil of war itself; "If a story seem moral, do not believe it...you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil" (TTTC, 64-5). However, this idea applies to more media than just literature. In Susan Sontag book “On Photography”, she delves into how atrocities from which she felt detached, because she only knew the factual background, had a strong impact on her when seeing photographs of the events. “Something broke. Some limit had been reached…a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still dying” (Sontag, “On Photography”). Sontag’s words corroborate O’Brien’s argument for emotional impact over factual impact, just in another form of media. A photograph is often a source of emotional depiction of events, and therefore supports the theme that emotion has a deeper impact portraying atrocities than factual evidence/accounts