Truth In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Where, precisely, do we need to draw the line between reality and imagination, between truth and fabrication? When it comes to observing the ever-expanding world all around us, many people find it incredibly arduous not to let their beliefs of how the world should be influence their view of how the world actually is. For instance, much of American society after the conclusion of World War II was convinced that the spread of communism within Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia would ultimately lead to worldwide oppression and poverty, thus resulting in America’s eventual involvement in Vietnam. However, even though the United States’ administration sought to wholly “liberate” the Vietnamese from the “evil clutches” of communism during the conflict,

The Quiet American by Graham Greene tries to emphasize these hazards of attempting to make reality in one’s head happen in the real world, of letting one’s ideals of life take priority over life itself. Even though we would like to believe that everything in our mindset is indeed fact, Greene desires for a clear border to be drawn between what is factual and what is implied. Still, is there a possibility or an exception for the border to become blurred? Tim O’Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, seems to think so. Nearly opposite to Greene, O’Brien possesses a much hazier range of what the “truth” actually entails. Using his past experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, O’Brien crafted a narrative that praises the ambiguous art of war-time storytelling and its power to shape the reader’s and/or listener’s perception of actuality. More so, the novel intentionally blends fact and fiction together to make the point that objective truth should retain very little relevance in the grand

“They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said, ‘Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.’ He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body, he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy” (Greene 32). Reading from a textbook or listening to an orator can make it fairly easy to philosophize about the world, to create a sole identity and purpose in one’s own head. Fowler declares that Pyle’s compulsion of only relying on what he read and what he was told was what made a mockery of the young man. In fact, perhaps Pyle did not possess any more real-time information on the matter than the average individual. A static definition of reality simply became redundant, and that definition is what he chose to keep in his memory banks. It is when he vowed to make his mental concepts a reality that it becomes clear how reality does not connect at all with the quixotic standards written on a measly piece of paper. No matter what, Greene reiterates that it is necessary to prevent these ideological notions from