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Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

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Stories one way or another always have a little bit of fiction, whether it be a color of shoes or a time of day, stories don’t always hold all of the truth. In the novel, The Things They Carried, O’Brien explains his life and experience in the Vietnam War. Being the narrator in the novel, he depicts the relationship between fiction and reality itself. Calloway’s definition of metafiction fits Tim O’Brien’s novel because O’Brien himself is the main character. He is a veteran describing his experiences during the Vietnam War, but he’s also a writer who is explaining the truth behind writing stories. O’Brien tells many stories about death, friends, and times during the war. These stories are all fiction because in the novel O’Brien is his own main character making the novel a fiction due to the changes in the stories and people. O’Brien consistently reminds his readers that the stories in his book are fiction, but explaining that stories …show more content…

When he got his call to become a solider everything changed for him, he didn’t know whether to go to war or to run away, but in the end he decided that he would go. The protagonist submitted “…to Vietnam, where [he] was a soldier, and then home again. [he] survived, but it’s not a happy ending. [he] was a coward. [he] went to the war” (O’Brien, 58). Narrator O’Brien explains to his readers that he was a coward because he gave up on his principles and submitted to the war. Author Tim O’Brien’s autobiography explains his experience in Vietnam and what he felt about the war, and he reveals that he himself was against the war but in the end he “was a coward [he] went to Vietnam” (The Vietnam in Me). The similarities between author O’Brien and character O’Brien show that this fiction but holds some sort of reality to it, although they’re made up

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Tim O’brien’s historical fiction book The Things They Carried is focused around soldiers involved in the Vietnam War. This war was a difficult time for both the Americans who were drafted to fight in the war as well as for those who were at home and disagreed with the idea of currently being in war in Vietnam. As he writes about his own fictional experiences during the war along with the stories of many other fellow troops, O’brien expresses that it is difficult to “tell a true war story”. With the use of imagination and invention, he is able to successfully convey the difficulties involving truth-telling and wartime conditions. O’brien is open with his intended audience and blatantly states that it is hard to tell a true war story.

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This phase out of the book The Things They Carried, shows how important a detailed description is. Having read the fictional story about Tim O’Brien’s experience in the Vietnam War, can really set off that emotional connection because it makes you feel like you are really

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What if they don’t want to fight, kill someone or be killed. These young men go through internal struggles like this when they are drafted to go to war, what if they die fighting for something they don’t support or get wounded in ways words can’t describe. In Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried, the main protagonist in the story Tim O’Brien faces these internal struggles when he received his draft card. Personally, if I was in Tim’s position I would also struggle with the decision, to fight in a war which I don’t agree with. Tim's inner conflict occurred around if he didn’t go to war and escaped to Canada what would people think of him, he was afraid of being embarrassed in his small hometown called Worthington.

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In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, he uses metafiction by writing about how he made up most of the stories. The stories of his experiences from the Vietnam war in his book, create a war-like perspective for his readers to better understand war because often, battles can be spotty in the mind and the imagination fills the gaps. O’Brien uses his book to help the reader find truth. Many things in The Things They Carried are confusing and contracting.

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In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, O’Brien is the narrator recounting his experiences as a Vietnam War veteran through the form of storytelling. After death, people and experiences fade away and are often forgotten, and the only way to keep their lives remembered is to continue to tell them through story. There were many traumatic events that O’Brien had to deal with, namely the deaths of soldiers, the vietnamese soldier he killed, and the death of his childhood friend Linda. Many of the surviving soldiers developed PTSD and had flashbacks, while O’Brien held them in and blocked away the memories, as a form of catharsis. Storytelling becomes his form of therapy, and method of preserving the lives of the deceased.

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Both a novel and a collection of interrelated short stories, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a book that emerges from a complex variety of literary standards. O'Brien presents to his readers both a war journal and a writer's autobiography, and complicates this presentation by creating a fictional protagonist who shares his name. To fully comprehend and appreciate the novel, particularly the passages that gloss the nature of writing and storytelling, it is important to remember that the work is fictional rather than a conventional non-fiction, historical account. Protagonist "Tim O'Brien" is a middle-aged writer and Vietnam War veteran. The primary action of the novel is "O'Brien's" remembering the past and working and reworking the

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The narrator O’Brien discusses his personal feelings about the war and tells of his story how he ended up there. He was drafted as like a lot of young men in America at this time, and he tries to avoid going by almost fleeing the country. He decides not to flee, not for himself, or any want or pride to go to the war and fight for his country, but to avoid embarrassment. O’Brien feels if he doesn’t go to the war, he would not be able to take knowing he disappointed his family.

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In “The Things They Carried”, the author, Tim O’Brien, uses unique and varying storytelling techniques to get his point across. These techniques can make the reader question or better understand the tone, details, and the author’s experiences in these stories. The thin line between factual events and the “truth” is also brought up in this book as O’Brien twists each story into his own version of the truth. The techniques O’Brien uses to do all this is metafiction to have direct conversation with the reader, detail to help provide a clear image of his experiences, and tone so the reader understands O’Brien’s thoughts and reflections on each story and the feelings he wants to convey to the reader. O’Brien uses these to provide information to the reader and to help them have a better understanding of the book.

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Examples of stories and the way they make people feel are used extensively throughout the novel to explore the question. O’Brien leaves the interpretation of war stories up to the audience as he exposes the different methods of storytelling and allows the tales of war to tell themselves.

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O’Brien not only is the writer but also puts himself in the story by being an actual character. O’Brien says that his novel is a combination of short stories, essays, and journalisms. Several times throughout the story, O’Brien mentions how he feels like he is completely reliving the past and sometimes its sad, sometimes its happy. One of the most important stories throughout the book is "How To Tell A True War Story," and the title does not refer to how to simply tell a true war story but how to tell if a war story is true or not. An important theme in the novel that centers on the difference between how war is perceived by people who have not experienced it first hand as opposed to what war really is

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As O’Brien narrates his novel with these imaginative stories, he implements a series of deeper meanings behind every story, telling another story or truth beyond the initial story. “As a result, the stories become epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the ways of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and visions” (Calloway, 249-250). O’Brien’s stories become differentiation between justified truth or opinion and create multiple perspectives to engage the reader into a process of imagination to determine what is true. As O’Brien carries out the novel, it doesn’t center around a “true war story” or “historical document,” but combines the concepts of fact and fiction in order to distinguish what is true and what it means for a story to be declared true or not, as well as the relevance of a story being told. “If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the fiction in order to write history, O’Brien’s narrator also makes liberal use of history to develop and organize the fiction” (Silbergleid, 129).

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He fought a war in Vietnam that he knew nothing about, all he knew was that, “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He realized that he put his life on the line for a war that is surrounded in controversy and questions. Through reading The Things They Carried, it was easy to feel connected to the characters; to feel their sorrow, confusion, and pain. O’Briens ability to make his readers feel as though they are actually there in the war zones with him is a unique ability that not every author possess.

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There is no doubt that O’Brien actually went to Vietnam, however, there is some doubt that events that occurred within the text actually happened. When addressing these occurrences, he uses language that leads the reader to believe that the account itself may be fictional. For example, in “How to Tell a True War Story” alone, O’Brien essentially convinces the reader that many of his accounts in Vietnam are fabricated. He goes to the extent of saying things like: “In many cases a true war story cannot be

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How it was shaped: Tim allowed the draft of the Vietnam war and societal pressures get to the best of him and he slowly tore himself apart, he started off as a confident incorrigible man. His morals later then became corrupted, he gave into the pressures, his self proclaimed Lone Ranger status had been infected and debunked by his end decision of serving in the Vietnam war. Thesis: In the story, On the Rainy River, the author, Tim O’Brien demonstrates that an individual allows societal pressures and expectations to override their core values, morals, and beliefs; peer pressure forces individuals to put their beliefs aside so they can fit in with everyone else. The narrator, Tim O’Brien faces a similar situation when he get’s drafted for the Vietnam War.

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This is evident when Mr. O’Brien says, “I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to,” (pg. 57.) In the end the author realized what he must do and went back home, so he could fight in the Vietnam

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