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The Things They Carried A War Story Analysis

637 Words3 Pages

The things they carried is a novel by Tim O’Brien. About the Vietnam war. About the lives of people going there. It’s a collection of war stories. Some of them true, some of the untrue and that’s the main topic that’ll be discussed in this paper. What is a true war story? How can it be told? this is a quite complicated question with a quite complex response(s). a true war story is something beyond generalizing, that could be true and untrue at a time. There is not only one type of truth, but happening and seeming truths, and not the man could know the real truth in a war story. “To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true…(p81). This contradictory passage is somehow paradoxical. …show more content…

It was rigged 105 round…(p84)”. According to the narrator, if Lemon had a chance to tell how he died he would tell that sunlight beautifully killed him. Not a detonator, because he didn’t see one. The thing he saw was the light. He really did so it’s true. It’s true that the sunlight killed him, from his point if view. But not from O’Brien’s. He saw how he exploded on a detonator . and that’s the truth. That’s where the reader gets to the diverse truth. O’Brien differentiates between happening and seeming truths. The truth that Lemon exploded on a detonator is a happening truth. The actual reality. But the story Lemon would tell is a seeming truth. This real truth, the happening one can never reject Lemon’s seeming truth. They can coexist together with other seeming truths in addition. This story, with it’s truths is many-sided. Many truths fit the story. Maybe it’s war itself that makes story multilateral. War makes people define some things differently from each other. War is what denies an absolute truth in a war story. “In war you lose your sense of definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and, therefore, it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true(p82)”. War many-sided. In war, one can never say anything definitely because the perception

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