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Truth In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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Recommended: Stories of war narrative writing

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. …show more content…

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

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O’Brien then goes on to say that failure to remember and forgery of details take place in every war story, causing the truth to be questioned. O’Brien finishes

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His stories are images of his own experiences in the war, as he is the narrator and main character in most of the stories. Some of his points of view are how war is an ambiguous thing and how it changes people. For instance, in “How to tell a true war story” the author reflects on the feelings of being alive after a fight, proposing that war is hell but also many other things. In O’Brien’s words “You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self- your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it.

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According to O’Brien, a true war story often can’t be told and that factual truth is often blurred by the emotional truth as told by the storyteller. With this, the line between reality and fiction is often has to be determined by the reader. Defined reality is what can be proven, while perceived reality is what is believed to have happened. In The Things they Carried, O’Brien is seen changing the truth in order to provide the reader a sense of the emotions of war, not a factual account of

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The Dentist "He kept replaying his own exploits, tacking on little flourishes that never happened" (82). Now, the question, "Which is more important—story-truth or happening-truth?" is asked. This above quote from Tim O 'Brein gently represents how a little thing called story-truth happens. The greatest difference between story and happening-truth is the simple fact that happening-truth reveals actual events that have occurred, whereas story-truth, which Tim O 'Brien, the author of The Things They Carried, heavily emphasizes, is subjectively reflecting a person 's thoughts and feelings when recounting a tale, and putting theme above all else. The importance of the two is where everything lies, where the author of the novel pushes for story

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Stories can show us see things from a different perspective. Stories give us access to other people’s lives and give us access to our own lives. Tim O’Brien wrote a story of a soldier who was on a night watch. He had grenades lined up ready to use. When he saw a Korean soldier walking down the path he thought to himself “the reality of what was

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In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.

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For example, he tells the story of Curt Lemon's death and proceeds to analyze and explain why it holds an element of truth. Ultimately, he surmises, "truth in a story is not necessarily due to 'factual' accuracy." Instead, if the story affects the reader or listener in a personal and meaningful way, then that emotion is the truth of the story. O'Brien tests these ideas by relating the stories that others told in Vietnam, like the story of a soldier who brought his girlfriend to Vietnam and grows more and more terrified as she becomes fascinated by the war and ultimately never returns home. The soldiers who hear the story doubt its truth, but are drawn into the story nonetheless, showing that factual accuracy is less important but emotions is kinda the big

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Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are". (O'Brien 38) O’Brien uses his stories to reach his audience. There are generations of people who have no clue what war is really like, whether it is because of our misconceptions based on what media portrays or the fact that there are people who have not served in the military. Some people might know about Vietnam and know the outcome of the war, but they don’t have the experience and real life understanding of how that story ended. They might not be able to fully understand the feelings of a soldier.

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His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him” (O’Brien 172). The purpose of a story-truth is to make his readers see what he saw, his memory, and whichever truth is told alters the answers to questions. Without them, there would almost be no point in asking questions, because there would be no truth to tell, all memories would be a

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O’Brien goes into great depth in this small quote on how loss of innocence and war can affect people in the war. The quote “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t” shows how war is so different from what any human experiences at home. After that small quote he follows it up by bringing up how you have to use normal stuff to show how crazy these things are and how much of a pole it can have on somebody during a war. The way that war is treated for many is mostly the mental part that is struggling. But for many "War is hell, but that's not half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.

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He did not want to come home,” because at home it was as if he was in a different world than those around him (Hemingway 3). This is also true of O’Brien as readers see through his efforts to tell a true war story that no one could relate or even listen to him without some

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This quote epitomizes the trauma caused by war. O’Brien is trying to cope, mostly through writing these war stories but has yet to put it behind him. He feels guilt, grief, and responsibility, even making up possible scenarios about the life of the man he killed and the type of person he was. This

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Story truth is truth that is fictional, but convenient to telling the story. Lastly, happening truth is what actually happened in an event. The question of ‘What is the real truth?” is answered to an extent, as throughout the book we witness each type of

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The Power of the Narrator Truth is not what was seen or heard or happened, but what was felt. It can neither be generalized nor objectified because it is unique to the person who experiences it. The author’s best option to make the story feel true for the reader is to make it relatable to them by using the narrator. For the reader to relate to the story most, the narration of the story should alter depending on the content of the story. Tim O’Brien focuses on the relationship between narration, truth and feeling in his compilation of stories called The Things They Carried.

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War was so much more than just war to O’Brien and he able to share this through his writing. " But this is true: stories can save us. ... in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world." (page

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