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Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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For many soldiers returning home from war, the truth about what happened can be a hard and confusing thing. The book The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, and published in 1990, describes his time in the war. O’Brien struggles the whole time with differentiating his emotional memories with events that actually happened, and tries to impress upon the reader what it was actually like to be over in Vietnam. O’brien believes that war stories do not always accurately portray what war was like, and that is why story-truth can be truer than the happening-truth. In this book Tim O’Brien explains the difference of what he calls “story-truth” and “happening-truth”. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way” (71). Happening-truth is actual events that happened with real people in a real time. Story-truth may not have actually …show more content…

O’Brien presents a story in which he kills an innocent Vietnamese man walking through the woods. He describes the guilt and remorse he feels for his actions. He references this story several times throughout the book. Around the third time he admits that the guy he specifically described was not real, and that in fact he never killed anyone in the war, but the fact that he witnessed so many deaths put him at fault. “I remember his face, which was not a pretty face because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present” (179). Though the happening-truth was that O’Brien never killed anyone during the war, the story-truth made up by O’Brien himself is that he did. The emotions he felt were of such strong grief that that what he remembers and tells is that he killed someone, because in his mind he

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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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The Things They Carried, written by Tim O’Brien, focuses on the author’s experiences in the Vietnam war. This book confronts the truth about death and the wave of agony that hits after the fact. The story highlights the ways that Tim and his fellow soldiers find ways to cope with the immense amount of pain that comes with war. Throughout the book, Tim O’Brien explores the power of storytelling and how it allows those who are physically dead to remain alive in the memories of other. There are many ways in which O’Brien has found storytelling to help him confront the death that he has faced.

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And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’” (77). We can never assume the truth in a war story. The only way to discover the truth hidden behind the lies is to pull away the many layers or in this case the stories that make up a war

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In If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, Tim O’Brien’s intent is to showcase that the war in Vietnam was wrong and unjust because of the horror stories of the soldier’s experience, the atrocities committed by the Americans troops, and finally how O’Brien’s view of the American military drastically changed from how he idolized the military after WWII and throughout the Korean war, to drastically disapproving with the war effort. The soldiers who fought in Vietnam experienced a multitude of awful things, and O’Brien uses these stories to to back up the fact that the Vietnam war was horribly wrong. One example is the violent and deadly battles the soldiers endured. There were many battles throughout the book, but one battle in

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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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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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The Things They Carried, is a reflection on how Tim O’Brien spent his days in Vietnam. There are many factors to why it can be difficult to share a war story, there is no proof to tell how much he is just telling a story or saying something else to make it easier to share his experience. “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. ”pg.68.

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O’Brien does not try to justify his actions, but makes up a life story that is very similar to his own to try to familiarize with the dead Viet Cong soldier he stumbles upon in the story “The Man I Killed”. The story O’Brien makes up highlights the dead soldier's life. Going from being teased for his women-like appearance at school and faking his excitement of fighting and being patriotic in front of his father and uncles. O’Brien continues to make up stories about the young Viet Cong soldier, how he went to continue his passion in math, going to study in Saigon and how he met this girl that liked him for his bony legs and small wrists. The way that O’Brien handles guilt after the war shows his own problems that arose during the war.

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In the chapter when he describes the man he kills, he talks about the state of the dead body by saying, “His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole…the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him” (O’Brien Chapter 11). This brutal and horrifying imagery displays an irrefutable element of truth to O’Brien’s writing. Not only does this imagery highlight the truth to his writing, but it also sheds light on the brutal truth about the war in Vietnam. By using imagery as such a strong rhetorical device in his writing, he gives the average person a taste of just how barbaric and cruel Vietnam felt for the people who experience the war first hand on either side of the fighting. Tim O’Brien gives a very detailed and intense description of his time fighting in Vietnam during their war with America.

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After reading The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, it is astoundingly clear that truth plays an essential role in the story’s overall meaning and portrayal as an authentic Vietnam War story. In this complex narrative, the topic of truth has been interpreted in many specific and intricate ways. Many interpret his usage of truth similarly to one another, stating how “war inevitably imposes a compromised version of the interpretation of a genuine experience”, causing O’Brien to project altered truths so the experience can truly connect and express its true state (Wesley 2). This common trend seen in these authors’ coverage of truth is that they examine the synthesized, story truth that Tim O’Brien utilized in his story aimed to better emphasize

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The real truth as he depicts it is nothing more than nameless faces lying dead in the street who O’Brien could do nothing for except look away. This truth does not allow the reader to understand what O'Brien and his fellow soldiers were experiencing at the time. It is a truth of the war, but does not truthfully depict what war was like. However, the “story-truth” in O’Brien’s words, “makes things present. [O’Brien] can attach faces to grief and love and pity to God”(172).

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The Things They Carried” is a great short story by Tim O’Brien who displays the remarkable story of soldiers during the Vietnam War. Being away from your family, in an unknown place, giving up your life’s luxuries is difficult to handle mentally and physically. Similarly, in the short story we see how soldiers try to overcome their fear by escaping from the reality of the war time situation around them, to a world that is just an illusion. Throughout the short story we see several men coping through their fear in Vietnam as they had the responsibility of a solider and carried burdens of need and emotions. In order to cope with their fear, the soldiers talked with each other and told each other what they felt since the only thing that they had was time and pain.

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As O’Brien narrates his novel with these imaginative stories, he implements a series of deeper meanings behind every story, telling another story or truth beyond the initial story. “As a result, the stories become epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the ways of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and visions” (Calloway, 249-250). O’Brien’s stories become differentiation between justified truth or opinion and create multiple perspectives to engage the reader into a process of imagination to determine what is true. As O’Brien carries out the novel, it doesn’t center around a “true war story” or “historical document,” but combines the concepts of fact and fiction in order to distinguish what is true and what it means for a story to be declared true or not, as well as the relevance of a story being told. “If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the fiction in order to write history, O’Brien’s narrator also makes liberal use of history to develop and organize the fiction” (Silbergleid, 129).

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O’Brien talks about the death of a young man with skinny wrists, skinny ankles, and a star-shaped hole in his eye. He gives him life by making him into a story, so that way he could be distracted by the fact that the young boy won’t be able to read it. He wrote this chapter to express his remorse, guilt, and shame for the boy that lost his life in front of O’Brien’s eyes, whether the death was by his hand or not. Although the title of this chapter, The Man I Killed, is about a man who died, it is unclear if O'Brien killed anyone in the war. Remorse can be described as a distressing emotion experienced by someone who regrets their actions which they have

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He fought a war in Vietnam that he knew nothing about, all he knew was that, “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He realized that he put his life on the line for a war that is surrounded in controversy and questions. Through reading The Things They Carried, it was easy to feel connected to the characters; to feel their sorrow, confusion, and pain. O’Briens ability to make his readers feel as though they are actually there in the war zones with him is a unique ability that not every author possess.

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