Things They Carried

The Power of fiction in The Things They Carried
Tim O’Brien is a veteran of The Vietnam War and his experience has provided the literary world with a book called The Things They Carried. This book was written with a special focus on the truths and untruths of the war and the stories that follow. These truths tied into untruths are continually highlighted throughout most of the short stories integrated into this book by multiple uses of hyperbole showing the stories as lies, this is an attempt to tell a story for meaning, displaying the feelings of the soldiers as a means of experience for the readers. This confusion forces the readers to stray from reality causing a further understanding of the real feelings that the perilous war created, showing

Throughout Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories in the book The Things They Carried, Tim forces readers to question whether these stories are true while reading, this is due to Tim telling us to never trust a true war story in the chapter “How To Tell a True War Story”. This is partly because of the outlandish ideas being represented in the stories of war but, also due to the misconceptions caused by war. O’Brien’s goal in writing these stories in this confusing manner of skewed reality, while also telling us they are not true events is to cause the readers to feel unsure about what the truth of war is. To be clear Tim’s truth is not the happening truth, but

Timmerman in “Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage.’” states that “War stories must evoke the dreams and lives of individual soldiers, as opposed to giving a statistical or historical accounting of data.”(1) this is because the facts and numbers are not enough to inform the world about the horrors, the reality of war is that there is no moral, and frankly reality is no longer relevant, it has been skewed and new realities are made. We can see this often throughout the stories, seeing characters such as Norman Bowker who are caught between these realities, never able to escape the new world created by the horrors experienced in war and in the end traumatized more than any other because he is trapped,--between the world created by war and the lack of listeners-- with no way out. All he wishes is for people to know and listen to the reality of the feelings, so they can understand the torture that the men of war trudged through, yet the people will only hear fact. Although similarly, O’Brien seeks this same goal as Norman but is successful, showing the war through the feeling of misconceptions brought by the horror of war displaying the truth of war’s horror better than the facts displayed in history