Truth and fiction are what create a real war story. Tim O’Brien conveys this concept in The Things They Carried. In novel he reveals the ultimate emotions contained within war stories. Specifically in the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” O’Brien develops his thoughts behind this. He includes multiple versions of stories throughout the book, to further enhance the interpretation of how sanity is believed to be contained by the imagination in stories, which brings an unreal reality.
As a part of imagination in stories, a sense of a better reality comes into place. O’Brien demonstrates in various instances where fiction comes into stories to create stability. In the excerpt "Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: 'Night March' and 'Speaking of Courage'."
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He explains “But in a story I can steal her soul, I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging… In a story miracles can happen”(224), meaning that tragedies may be hard to handle but stories are able to help manage misery for those suffering. He also points out that stories contains much more meaning to the person, “There is the illusion of aliveness”(218), making events a way to better handle their outcomes. In “The things he carries: for Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam War has remained a crucible in his fiction, but the power of imagination and memory, and ‘our elusive interior worlds’, loom large, too.” the author Jack Smith gives a further insight of how O’Brien portrays stories as a coping mechanism. Smith says “...but at the same time those realities are being processed in a mix of memory and imagination. Which is how we shape experience...Reality or what we call reality has traveled through the human mind and come out the other end as a blur” (3), giving of the idea of how the author inputs both fiction and truth as a way of tackling life