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. You can’t connect to it because you don’t understand what has happened and without understanding the facts, history gets boring real quick. “You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.” Tim O’Brien doesn’t want his readers to be bored with his writing. He wants people to understand, ask questions, connect and honestly think about what they read. …show more content…
When you read that, you think to yourself, “wow that’s a lot of people.” Your brain doesn’t feel an emotional connection because a statistic is worth less than a description of what led to the massive killing. “In a true war story, if there’s a 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.” This phase out of the book The Things They Carried, shows how important a detailed description is. Having read the fictional story about Tim O’Brien’s experience in the Vietnam War, can really set off that emotional connection because it makes you feel like you are really