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Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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In Tim O'Brien's “The Things They Carried,” a fictional novel about an American platoon during the Vietnam War, O’Brien insists that the book and stories being told are real, only to contradict himself after a few pages. I believe O’Brien does not do this because he is an eccentric writer, but because he is trying to make us believe that these fictional characters’ deaths and hardships are real, in order to convey a message about how there is beauty in death. While reading through the stories it is often difficult to separate what is fictitious, and what is true. Throughout the novel we seem to find two different “truths”, which are “story truth” and “happening truth”. O’Brien uses war related imagery to demonstrate the power of storytelling by describing the brutal realities of death and how soldiers meet it and deal with it. One of the first deaths is Ted Lavender’s who shot in the head after relieving himself, “zapped while zipping,” as the other soldiers put it. There’s as Kiowa’s death who is sucked down into a “mud field”. Another death that we see is Curt Lemon’s, blown …show more content…

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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In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the main theme is how to tell whether a war story is true or made-up. The author explores the conflict within reality and fiction by arguing that true war stories are hard to believe. In O’Brien’s view, he points out that “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. ”(p.80). Moreover, to make his point, the author spins between facts and fiction causing difficulty for the readers to believe if those stories actually happened or

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O’Brien says that a true war story is something you believe with your stomach and has no moral. For O’Brien, something isn’t true unless it feels true. A true war story should leave you with a deeper emotional connection. For example, the death of Rat Kiley’s best friend is a true war story because it has no moral.

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In The Things They Carried, author Tim O’Brien constructs a seemingly autobiographical yet ostensibly fictional story of the war in Vietnam and its effects on a platoon of American soldiers. O’Brien’s inclusion of fact within fiction strengthens the rhetoric of the individual stories in The Things They Carried while leaving readers to question the overall truthfulness and validity of the stories. The members of the American platoon also question plausibility when struggling to grasp the credibility of Rat Kiley’s story of his first assignment near the Song Tra Bong river. Kiley describes his time in the Chu Liu mountains when a young medic named Mark Fossie decides to bring a girl named Mary Anne to the camp to demonstrate the camp’s lack of safety.

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What’s more powerful, the truth or a lie? How are we able to tell the difference? It’s all from a person’s perspective and the way we choose to spin the story. There is no way to identify the real situation unless you were there to witness the event. Throughout the novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien there is a discussion over whether he is using fiction or nonfiction.

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Through this story, O’Brien describes a True war story and is able to prove the point of telling them. As a soldier named Rat Kiley tells the story, the other men comment on it. When Rat asks them what they think will happen, the men point to the details Rat described and say, “...all that had to be there for a reason. That’s how stories work, man” (O’Brien 102).

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When listening to a war story, gruesome details are expected. They are expected to be sad and terrifying yet ultimately interesting to hear. When listening to a war story, it is expected to be true. Tim O’Brien offers a number of different stories from the Vietnam war in his collection of short stories, “The Things They Carried.” In his short story, “How to Tell a True War Story,” he informs his audience that in telling a story from war, the truth becomes irrelevant.

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“Make plain to them the excellence of killing / And a field where a thousand corpses lie” (Crane 21-22). The poem “War is Kind” shows that the soldiers are brainwashed to believe that it is a good thing to kill, but in contrast, many soldiers return from war scarred from the mentally exhausting tasks that they endure. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, is a collection of short stories that expresses the experiences and feelings of a platoon of American soldiers facing combat in the jungles of Vietnam. The characters endure heartbreak and hardships that change them as people and will carry with themselves after the war. In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, O’Brien reveals how the mindset of soldiers changes when guilt,

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The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien is a fictional account of the Vietnam war that seeks to reveal a truth about storytelling. He shows this through several examples, most notably in "Speaking of Courage", where he describes a veteran who can't fit in and drives around the lake, "The man I killed", where the narrator, Tim kills a Vietcong soldier, and "In the Field", which is the opposite of that as it is more direct and isn't as fictionalized. He shows the audience what really happens with "Notes", and "Good Form". Using this book, Tim O'Brien seeks to reveal the truth on how using fiction in narratives can show a deeper truth than just the happening truth.

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Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.

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The Things They Carried is a book by Tim O’Brien, who appears as a character in this fictional book as a sort of self-insert in this fictional story. The book has 232 pages, and is divided into several unnumbered chapters. It was published in 1990 by Houghton Mufflin, and was printed in the USA. The story goes in a rather confusing and awkward order, rather than telling the story in a linear passage of time, each chapter takes place during a different part of O’Brien’s life. It’s written from O’Brien’s point of view many years after the Vietnam war.

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The novel suggests that it is important to continue to tell stories; by doing so someone’s life lives on, someone’s legacy lives on, someone’s contribution to our world lives on. Through stories, generations of people will learn about tales of survival, triumph, and failure. By listening to the stories in the novel readers are challenged by having to decide whether the author is telling a true war story, based upon its detail, or one that is not true. Tim O’Brien does this by not having a clear fence between non-fiction and fiction, he believed that: “telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat…it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what happened to me…all the mistakes id made, all the terrible things I had seen and done”

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This forewarns the reader that they could be reading something that is real or something that is completely made up. O’Brien is a masterful writer who has created an unique story about the experience of war through his style of writing.

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Either it being self defense, economic gain or for a political movement, War is influenced by many factors that lead to catastrophic results. Both the Gulf and Vietnam wars are explained by the article, “Military Multiculturalism in the Gulf War and After” and short story “The Things They Carried” that signify the blind eye displayed by humans during these wars. What allows Humans to process traumatic events is to turn the other way around and fill their minds with joyful moments in their life. A couple of ways are displayed in both the short story and article are the soldiers letting their mind escape and thinking about the things they brought with them from home and the public accepting the medias filtered perspective of war by supporting

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For example, in the story "The Man I Killed," O’Brien describes the killing of a young Vietnamese soldier by one of his fellow soldiers. While the "Happening Truth" of the story is that a man was killed, the "Story Truth" is the emotional weight that the killing carries, both for the soldier who committed the act and for the narrator himself. By exploring these emotional and psychological realities, O’Brien is able to create a more nuanced and complex portrayal of the Vietnam War and its impact on those who lived through

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In Tim O’brien’s war story, The Things They Carried, the narrator describes the life of American soldiers and provides evidence of how the war has impacted their lives. In the 1960’s, young American men were sent to fight in the war thousands of miles away from their homes. At this time, most men had no prior experience of fighting in a war. Naturally, the men had no idea what kind of brutality the war held also how much of a vital role the war would play in their futures. O’brien’s own experience with the war displayed that the fear of getting shamed before ones own peers played a main and also motivating factor for joining the draft.

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