The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

War-caused distractions, misinterpreted reality and limited control due to the human condition appear frequently throughout the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien, as a narrator describes his struggle with storytelling during and after the war. The constant challenge to determine reality versus personal perception arises in his memory. Some uncontrollable factors associated with recalling events include imaginative interference and uncertainty resulting from the human condition. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, telling story-truth, rather than happening-truth, is necessary, as no replica can be as genuine as the original.
Imagination interferes with acknowledging literal reality. When describing storytelling, the narrator, O’Brien says:

A storyteller invents comprehensible facts to fill in a story’s missing aspects. O’Brien continues to elaborate by explaining how “The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (O’Brien 67). Again, as a soldier, especially in the Vietnam War, it proves difficult to realize what actually occurs and find the ability to remember specific details to completely and precisely retell it some time afterwards. Tim implies imagination’s role when he writes, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (O’Brien 218). Storytelling and its process involves fabrication in order to make a story flow and intrigue those who hear it. While, inevitably, imagination and the human condition manage to disturb recalling the war’s reality, O’Brien finds solace in rearranging his perceptions, hoping to discover

In Steve Kaplan’s The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, he writes, “the facts about an event are given; they then are quickly qualified or called into question; from this uncertainty emerges a new set of facts about the same subject that are again called into question--on and on, without end” (Kaplan). Again, this uncertain questioning process catalyzes the storyteller to question his memories. In order to succeed in telling a war