Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

While the stories told in The Things They Carried are awfully realistic, the novel is a work of fiction. The stories are proven to be made up because the title page blatantly says “a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien.” However, a reader will find it difficult to remember the stories had never occurred, because of how convincingly O’Brien told them. In fact the author has such a strong sense of conviction that by the end of the novel the reader will assuredly have forgotten it was written as a work of fiction.

O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried roughly twenty years after exiting the Vietnam War. The assumption can be made that this time interval had a great impact on the way O’Brien told and created these stories. Within twenty years the author

I want you to know why story-truth is truer than happening-truth.” (171) In the brief chapter titled “Good Form,” O’Brien explained the importance of story-truth opposed to happening-truth. Throughout the novel, the author’s purpose is to use an undeniable sense of conviction to make us believe his stories so that we can deeply feel the same emotions he felt twenty years prior. “What stories can do is make things present.” (172) Had O’Brien told the “happening-truth,” readers would have felt disconnected, and undermined the details that made the soldiers feel what they felt. However, there is a fine line between the two “truths”, that may go unrecognized. In this chapter O’Brien acknowledges that the “story-truth’ and the “happening truth” can morph into one another, and all of the sudden the story-truth becomes reality in his mind. “What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way." (67-68) Therefore in a way, both truths can be

The last two lines in the poem translate to, “The old lie: It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” The connection between these lines and O’Brien’s quote is the idea that soldiers dying for their country is a concept that is undermined and dismissed everyday as a “sweet and honorable way to go,” when in reality it means so much more. The authors of the two works are expressing frustration toward their readers, trying to provide meaning to each and every war-related death. Each writer indicates that they are not convinced dying for your country is justifiable, and are struggling to draw reasoning from the way their comrades have