Truth In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

In his novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien aims to convey his experience fighting in the Vietnam War. This subject is very difficult to write about, because many readers have never gone through anything like this – O’Brien is showing them a world that seems completely foreign. Throughout the novel, he portrays people from different backgrounds, all of them deeply human, living through and contributing to something that goes against the very foundations of humanity. In order to be able to convey this disparity, he needs to use every tool available to him, including bending the truth.
At multiple points throughout the novel, the author discusses the difference between “story truth” and “happening truth.” The latter is simple to define:

One important reasons is that “story truth” can serve a purpose similar to that of a metaphor. In the chapters “Ambush” and “Field Trip,” O’Brien subtly makes the point that explaining what happened during the war to a civilian is similar to attempting to describe the adult world to a child. The things that children experience in the first few years of their lives do not prepare them to understand concepts such as death and loss. Therefore, in order to help them understand, the adult speaking them would have to compare these concepts to something that children are familiar with. Similarly, Tim O’Brien helps his readers begin to grasp the experience of being at war by explaining its impact in different

Over time, they begin to hear a strange music coming from the surrounding area. In this narrative, the details are crucial. Mitchell Sanders describes how the soldiers heard chimes and xylophones, and later an “opera and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and all kinds of funky chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff.” These details create the impression that the soldiers are not just hearing random noises; instead, they are listening to complex and highly choreographed musical numbers. By portraying the sounds as voices, Sanders implies that there is a conscious awareness behind them. Paired with the setting of the story, this creates an unnerving atmosphere, helping the listener to understand how the soldiers at the listening post felt.
As he is telling the story, Sanders claims that the listener, Tim O’Brien, will not believe it “because every word is absolutely dead-on true.” However, he later admits that much of it was actually fabricated. Sanders could have simply stated that the soldiers heard strange noises in the night, and this would have been more factually accurate. However, by describing the sounds of an orchestra and a cocktail party echoing in the mountains, he conveys the emotions of the soldiers far more effectively. The details he uses create a sense