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Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

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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. O’Brien used metafiction as a way to challenge the reader's mind to unravel a deeper connection between truth and reality and all the stories hidden in between. O’Brien begins to write about his journey through the Vietnam War and the unthinkable experiences. He tells war stories that we can only think are true but are never quite sure. O’Brien writes: “in any war …show more content…

You most likely will maintain a superstition about whether the event actually happened or if it is a matter of hearsay. O’ Brien expresses: “in many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility” (71). In this quote, it is almost as if you tend to believe the story O’Brien illustrates you are a gullible reader. You believe anything that seems reasonable. In my opinion I think that O'Brien's goal was, he wanted the novel to be a story of questionability but he also wanted the story to sound reasonable at the same time. Consequently, O’Brien states: “In any true war story, if there’s moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. 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 …show more content…

When we are faced with a traumatic event, we choose to remember only the boring details because we choose not to relive the event every day. This is called happening-truth. As stated by O’Brien: “here is happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (180). O’Brien tends to use happening-truth throughout The Things They Carried as a way to express what he was going through and felt but without all the detail. Although O’Brien used another type of truth known as story-truth. O’Brien writes: “here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him” (180). The story-truth is used throughout the novel as a way for the reader to picture was Tim O’Brien was going through at the time. As he pictured Kiowa sinking into the sewage field and grasping her boot, you could picture what was happening and what O’Brien was feeling in that very moment. Perhaps in the end, a true war story is never about an actual

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Why does Tim O’Brien only Share Fictional War Stories? How many times have you read a fact, but never truly connected to it? You probably didn’t have the emotional sense that you would have had if you were to read those facts, but in a story outline. Tim O’Brien expresses his experience in the Vietnam War, not by listing off facts, but by writing a fictional story so the readers can understand and feel the emotional connection. When someone reads a history book, it’s dull because it has bunch of facts without a detailed description.

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War, Belief and Emotion People comprehend war very differently; they either hate it, understand it, or love it; there are many literary works with stories depicting these points of view. In 1990, author Tim O’Brien described his view of war with his “work of fiction” The Things They Carried, a book supposedly based on his experiences in the Vietnam War. His descriptive and emotional work richly depicts the feelings and activities of several drafted soldiers in the Vietnam War. Twenty-two years later and based on an entirely different war, came American Sniper, the memoir of a sniper in the Iraq War, by Chris Kyle. Kyle’s proud and rhapsodizing work depicts his strong supportive feelings for the war and what he did there.

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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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In the chapter, How to Tell a True War Story, he emphasizes this a lot. “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.”

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“True” is a word that defines as in accordance with fact or reality ("true: definition of true in Oxford dictionary (American English) (US)", 2016). The Things They Carried, a novel written by Tim O’Brien, defines as a “true” story because it discusses soldiers’ real experiences in the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien wrote his novel based on his experience in the war as a young adult and his account of the Vietnam War has created discrepancy among readers on whether his novel is a “true” story or a glorified piece of exaggerated fiction. The Things They Carried was written to convey soldiers’ real experiences of the war and therefore is a “true” story.

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You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths" (158). O’Brien makes numerous conflicting comments on storytelling during certain chapters of the novel, such as "How to Tell a True War Story. " By making these comments, the narrator not only justifies the objective of The Things They Carried, but also provides clues regarding the content, composition, and interpretation of the novel. O’Brien states that: "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

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“The way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms [67]” The way he said that made the readers think if it was true or more of “it happened so fast and I don’t want to remember it so I’m going to make up things “or more of an exaggeration. ‘’ in many cases a true war story cannot be believed if you believe it be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal is necessary to make you believe the truly

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How does one discern truth? For Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, there is no singular definition of truth -- at least not one he could find while trekking through the war-torn Vietnamese countryside in the 1960s. O’Brien uses his personal experiences in Vietnam to craft a series of anecdotes considered fictional, written from the perspective of an American foot soldier ironically named “Tim.” In a seemingly random chapter of the novel, O’Brien directly addresses the readers by suggesting that the stories are entirely fabricated. He then implies that the idea of the stories being fabricated is also a fallacy.

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In The Things They Carried the author, Tim O’Brien, often shares his own war experiences, and in most, if not all of his stories, he mixes lies in with truths in order to compose them to be believable and comprehensible. Many times throughout the novel, O’Brien fails to acknowledge when he’s falsifying his stories, however, he notes that he actually adds lies in the reports on his wartime experiences, but doesn’t provide when he does so. He claims so many people don’t believe the reality of war that he truly experienced that he’s obliged to lie. Although he may be protecting the audience from the harsh reality of war, at times it’s burdensome to decipher myth from fact. He often leaves the reader wondering what actually happened, what did not

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In The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s story-telling method is an attempt to show that the lines between fiction and reality are often not that far. Even though the names or details may not be fully accurate, this does not change the fact that they are a reality for many. Additionally, he challenges the importance that we place on war and links it to a storytelling aspect because he’s pointing out that not every story has a moral to it. With tragic events, we typically want some sort of meaning behind them, some sort of assurance that the incident was not for nothing. However, this is not always true, as a character “Yeah, well…I don’t see no moral”…

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War stories can be very challenging stories to write, and most war stories are just replicas of other war stories in which it is all action, it is what we already know about war. A true war story should touch upon the soldiers and the lives and battles within themselves, not just the fighting out in the field. O’Brien defines what a real war story is and how it should be written in the story “How to Tell a War Story.” O’Brien believes that a true war story lies within the reality of the situation. In other words, O’Brien believes that war stories should be about the truth of it, the hardships and daily battles with their partners and with their psychological challenges.

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“That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future ... Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). The Things They Carried is a captivating novel that gives an inside look at the life of a soldier in the Vietnam War through the personal stories of the author, Tim O’Brien . Having been in the middle of war, O’Brien has personal experiences to back up his opinion about the war.

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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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