Truth In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

In The Things They Carried, the author and narrator, Tim O' Brien seeks to go beyond simply telling the stories he has to tell about his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. He wants to tell the audience a true war story, and dedicates a chapter, aptly named "How to Tell a True War Story," to giving the reader a better idea of his idea of how a war story should be told. O'Brien's recounting of the story of the baby buffalo epitomizes his view of telling a war story by implementing the concept of blurring truth and fiction which recurs throughout the book and exemplifies how it could enhance the reader's interpretation and understanding of the events and ideas that the author wants to convey, which go beyond a simple retelling of a war story,

As a work described as autobiographical fiction, O'Brien makes extensive use of fiction to enhance the perspective of reality in The Things They Carried, uses it mainly to achieve a desired response from the reader. To explain his view of storytelling, he considers the fact that the absolute truth may not be the best way to convey the true meaning and emotion associated with the story he wants to tell, and that substituting it with more impactful, yet fabricated experiences may be more effective. The story at face value was about Rat Kiley's pain about Curt Lemon's death. However, O'Brien intended for it to be an example of how arranging a story carefully could elicit various responses from the reader, from emotional connection to Rat Kiley, to preventing bias and generalization from the reader as they read the story. The same question that O'Brien poses in the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story" for the story of the four men and the grenade could be considered for the story of the baby buffalo too — "Is it true?" (79). Just like with that story,

With the buffalo incident, morality is blurred, as demonstrated in various incidents. Kiley's merciless shots to the buffalo were met with no confrontation from his peers. Someone kicked the dying buffalo. Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders throw the buffalo into the village well, tainting the village's water supply (76). Yet somehow, O'Brien describes this incident as a "love story" (81). To an ordinary civilian with preconceived notions of right and wrong, it might. However, O'Brien aims to achieve a skewed ethical perspective and avoids letting the reader instinctively take the civilian perspective in order to increase understanding of the situation in the O'Brien and the soldiers' perspectives. Despite how gruesome this incident would seem to the "inevitable woman" O'Brien mentions, the rest of the Alpha Company finds this incident to be a deep and profound experience of value, which would seem to defy the social norms (76,81). This moving away from the common perspective allows more meaning to be placed into the story than what would otherwise be placed, with the basic and uninformed generalizations O'Brien criticizes likely taking precedence without this element of