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Truth And Fiction In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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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'." …show more content…

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

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Tim O’ Brien’s book ‘The Things They Carried’ is a series of stories about the Vietnam War. Although all chapters in this book are related to the Vietnam War, each story transmits a different message to the readers and is narrated in different ways. In this essay, I have analyzed two stories to find the themes of each one and through what they are expressed. In “How to tell a true war story”, the author narrates two stories of the men in the Alpha Company and throughout the stories he disputes whether they are real or fabricated. On the other hand, in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, Rat Kiley tells the story of his first assignment in the isolated mountains of Chu Lai.

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In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried the narrator, Tim O’Brien, often blurs the lines between reality and fiction. As a young soldier, O’Brien recalls the Vietnam war including the sounds, sights, and his emotions, while 20 years later he again shares his feelings and experiences of the same event. This same event, however, is told differently in order to help him cope with the emotional pain of war. The details become blurry as the pain is too great to endure.

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But Tim O’brien flips those ideas upside down using the chapter “How To Tell A True War Story” in The Things They Carried. The reader learns of a young man whose best friend dies in war, and how he writes a letter to the sister about his life, only to never get one in return. Throughout this chapter, the reader learns how truly contradictory the idea of a “true war story” really is. With a reflective and didactic tone, Tim O’brien effectively teaches those who have not fought in a war how to tell a true war story-- that “a

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“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83). The theme of “happening-truth” versus “story-truth” is a constant opposition Tim O’Brien uses to convey his “true war story” to his audience. Many times in the book The Things They Carried, O’Brien lies to the reader to attempt to give the reader realistic events, so they can relate to the emotions O’Brien felt during the Vietnam war. O’Brien makes it clear in the chapter “Field Trip” that a person who has not been to war cannot comprehend what it was like. He uses a fictional character, Kathleen, to be a stand in for the reader; she is innocent and free from the burden of serving in wartime.

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The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is written by Tim O’Brien and is composed of short stories about O’Brien’s “experiences” in war. The setting is placed in various locations, but mainly around the 1950’s in Vietnam. Through his non-chronological stories, the reader learns about O’Brien’s experiences in the war along with the soldiers who were in his platoon. Through the book, we see both a memoir of the war and an autobiography, however, the book is considered fictional because of his storytelling technique. He writes how a true war story is hard to tell and elucidates the connection between storytelling and his war experience.

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That Stories Tell us about War What do you think Tim O’Brien want his reader to understand about war? He wants his readers to feel an emotional connection to the place that he describes. One of the main things that he wants his readers to feel is emotion. Or the feeling that you have been there.

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In The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien challenges the concept that war is glorious and heroic by using death to display the actuality of war. The book explores a collection of short stories written by Tim O’ Brien, who writes about the experiences within a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War. Within his stories, the deaths experienced reveal the reality of war which is insignificant and cowardly. The reality of war O' Brien discusses, contrasts the romanticized beliefs of war some people may have.

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Storytelling has such a large impact on all stages of life. Stories are told to teach a lesson, give hope, or get someone through a hard time. Tim O’Brien uses storytelling in his book, The Things They Carried, to teach lessons from war, and help readers understand about the baggage people bring to war. The publisher section of this novel has this warning in it, "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life all incidents, names, and characters are imaginary” (O'Brien).

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All throughout the book he says how you cannot believe a war story, and he wants to protect the people in his life like his daughter and himself from his own stories. There is a difference between happening-truth and story-truth, he uses his imagination to come up with an entire new truth for his readers and himself. Tim O’Brien uses his writing as a way to share his

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Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried” has many stories of people's different experiences with war. The three stories (“The Man I Killed”, “Ambush” and “Good Form”) all have the same way of writing that makes it clear to the reader how they know the emotions of the narrator's trauma. How they communicate those types of emotion, and how the people around them reassure them. Susan Farrell gave some of her opinions off of it that she put into a review.

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Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories, tells the story of soldiers in Alpha Company, who were fighting in the Vietnam War. Moreover, these stories depict the soldiers’ experience in the war zone, as well as their lives after returning home from war. Woven throughout these stories, however, is the notion that the narrator may be exaggerating or even telling a fabricated story, in lieu of what really happened. As O’Brien describes, in a war story, “almost everything is true” and, at the same time “almost nothing is true” (77). Ultimately, Tim O’Brien tries to confuse and obscure the notion of truth in his stories in order to emphasize the true chaotic nature of war and the emotional impact of combat on those who

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It’s ironic that one would want to relive the horrors of war. Traditionally, a veteran would do anything in his power to forget everything he saw and experienced at war. However, for Tim O’Brien, it’s the exact opposite: Storytelling is the way that he copes, the way he keeps the dead alive, and the way he allows for outsiders to feel what he felt during the war. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien portrays the power of storytelling by using it to rehumanize the soldiers during the hardships of war.

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In the book O’Brien uses imagery, figurative language and repetition to put across his message. His purpose for the story telling, is to clear his conscience of war and to tell the stories of soldiers who were forgotten by society. The narrator was against the war. In The Things They Carried.

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Using his past experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, O’Brien crafted a narrative that praises the ambiguous art of war-time storytelling and its power to shape the reader’s and/or listener’s perception of actuality. More so, the novel intentionally blends fact and fiction together to make the point that objective truth should retain very little relevance in the grand

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Literary analysis America’s war heroes all have the same stories to tell but different tales. Prescribed with the same coloring page to fill in, and use their methods and colors to bring the image to life. This is the writing style and tactic used by Tim O’Brien in his novel, “The Things They Carried”. Steven Kaplan’s short story criticism, The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, provides the audience with an understanding of O’Brien’s techniques used to share “true war” stories of the Vietnam War. Kaplan explains the multitude of stories shared in each of the individual characters, narration and concepts derived from their personal experiences while serving active combat duty during the Vietnam War,

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