Truth In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

In Tim O'brien's The Things They Carried, Tim portrays his argument of “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-trust.” Which is correct. Story-truth is truer because it captures the emotional side of a story. When people tell a story they can not only talk about the events but recall how they felt when they went through that experience. The story telling truth can be important with traumatic events because it shows how the experiences affected them and will continue to their whole life.
All of O'brien's stories were made up in some parts for coping reasons with war experiences and guilt coming out of the war. O'brien was a soldier but used made up stories to heal. He describes in the chapter “Good Form” that “Almost everything else is invented.” (O'brien 114) And “I want you to feel what I felt.” (O'brien 114) He wants us to know his experiences and how he felt going through a traumatic event like the Vietnam war. By using emotion in his stories, he walks us through his guilt and trauma he has now after the war. This shows us that even though it might not have happened, the trauma is more true than anything else. He added untrue aspects to his stories for a coping mechanism.

Stories are for joining the past to the future.” (O’Brien 24) This quote shows the emotional connection to people that went through an experience to people who hear about the experience. Stories have the power to capture the emotional part of it to go through the event in a way that concrete facts can’t. "A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth." (O’Brien 53) O’Brien uses this quote to emphasize the importance of how the story happened versus how the story was perceived and remembered. This helps show that story-truth is truer than