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Summary Of The Things They Carry In The Vignette By Tim O Brien

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There's some truths that just aren’t told; some stories are too horrific to relive, and they just have to let the past be the past. In the Things They Carry In the vignette How to tell a true war story it reveals a story about a group of young men serving their time in the Vietnam War. A group of US military men went up into the mountain side and sit there silently; Tim O'Brien narrates "They don't got tongues. All ears" (69). There's a fine line between story truth and happening truth but story truth is superior because it's the story everyone hears. The happening truth is that six men constantly listen, they sit on the side of that mountain for a week straight without saying a thing; dead silent, just listening. The men hear sounds; Michell Sanders says, "the guys start hearing this real, soft waked out music. Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it's not a radio" (69). The guys eventually start convincing themselves different things that’s actually going on down there. They finally decide that it's some sort of messed up …show more content…

You make up others" (152). What he's trying to say is in some situations they have no idea what the truth is; even the story truth. They don’t have one; so they just have to make something up for themselves to keep themselves from going insane. So in this case there is no happening truth nor story truth; so what they have to do is make a truth... a story truth. In the vignette Good Form Tim's daughter says "Daddy, tell the truth". She asks, " Did you ever kill anybody?" Then O'Brien goes on to say, "And I can say, honestly, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.' He can say no in happening truth but yes in story truth because he feels he did kill men; even if he didn't. "I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough." Says a guilty Tim. He never pulled the trigger but he was there which is enough for his story truth to

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In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the main theme is how to tell whether a war story is true or made-up. The author explores the conflict within reality and fiction by arguing that true war stories are hard to believe. In O’Brien’s view, he points out that “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. ”(p.80). Moreover, to make his point, the author spins between facts and fiction causing difficulty for the readers to believe if those stories actually happened or

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Alexie says in his text “My mother did her best to explain to me…” (330). This quote shows that the truth and reality do not just depend on the person who is telling the story. When people tell a story, they do their best to make the story seems real and true. However, it does not depend only on the story teller. It most depends on the audience or the person who is listening to the story.

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For instance, in one particularly moving part of the book, he talks about how mentally unstable he was after he killed someone. O’Brien could not stop thinking about the man he killed, he even started to make up a backstory for the dead man. “He had been born, maybe, in 1946 in the village of My Khe near the central coastline of Quang Ngai province where his parents farmed… many neighbors had joined in the struggle for independence,” (119). When his fellow platoon member, Kiowa, tried to his best to comfort him, it was ineffective as O’Brien remained silent the entire time. This is significant because this is one of many examples where O’Brien had been mentally scarred by the experience.

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