James Baehr Ms. Moriarty English 9 22 May 2023 The Purpose of a War Story People often think war stories are meant to depict the horrors of war accurately or attempt to educate future generations of the sins of the past. However, Tim O’Brien contests these perceived values through the war stories of himself and his comrades in The Things They Carried. The short story "The Lives of the Dead" illuminates that the aim of O’Brien’s war stories is solely to act as a vessel of the dead, acting to temporarily dull the pain of war and evade the emotional load of death. Due to the losses he experienced throughout his life O’Brien used war stories to face moments of tragedy and despair, rather than facing them head on. During the war, O’Brien and his platoon had to face the deaths of their …show more content…
When O’Brien and his comrades told war stories “[They] had to make up [Their] own”, when talking about the dead (226). These stories “were exaggerated, or blatant lies” yet the impact of the stories remained. They weren’t seen as a way to spread truth, but “a way of bringing body and soul back together” for a little while (226). Since war stories are used to maintain the existence of someone who recently died, they are, contrary to popular belief, opposed to the truth for the most part. While some truth is worked into the stories, even those aspects are twisted or exaggerated to make processing their death easier, often through humor as shown in Curt Lemons’ “trick or treating” war story, where it is implied that it is partly, if not entirely, made up by his close friend Rat Kiley, in order to bring his “body and soul back together” for a short while (226). War stories are meant to be told, not to be recounted. They are not truthful retellings of an event, but tall tales bordering on fantasy, told as a form of escapism from the lifetime of war that the soldiers experience, even when the “real” war is long