The Things They Carries by Tim O´brien

Many people assume that when someone is physically gone, they are gone forever. In the chapter “The Lives of the Dead” in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien the author demonstrates that people can, in fact, live on after death through people's thoughts, emotions and imagination with the motif of storytelling.

The first three words of the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” are, “This is true” (67). Although Tim O’Brien begins this chapter with such a bold and clear statement, throughout the chapter he has the reader thinking and confused when he contradicts himself by stating things such as, “In many cases a true war story cannot

The distractions of war, misinterpretation of reality and limited control of fate as a result of the human condition appear throughout the Vietnam War at all times. Tim O’Brien, as a narrator describes the struggles of storytelling during and after the war. The constant struggle to determine reality versus personal perception arises in many aspects of his memory. Some factors of recalling events are uncontrollable such as interference of imagination and uncertainty as a result of the human condition. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the telling of story-truth, rather than happening-truth, is necessary, as no replica can be as genuine as the original.

When being told a war story, one automatically assumes all that they are hearing is factual, and that all the trauma, devastation, and victory really happened. However, in the fictional The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, he turns the idea on its head: a story does not necessarily have to be honest if the emotions behind the story are. O’Brien uses techniques such as hyperbolic characters and verisimilitude to show his audience that while the verbatim anecdotes are not true, the sentiment behind them is true. Through the characters of Mary Anne and Norman Bowker, O’Brien successfully uses the audience’s trust against them to create varying images of unbelievability and believability, which ultimately helps achieve the goal of making his

Telling a war story will be changed for everyone depending on their experience and the different wars they been to. In The Thing They Carried telling a true war story is different because O’Brien says that it needs to be a heroic and noble and very specific “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seems to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed” (pg.67-68) it shows how O’Brien wants to impress the audience with his stories that makes one wonder if it is real or not. He wants to sound heroic which makes part of the purpose of the story, his side

There are many levels of truth in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This novel deals with story-telling as an act of communication and therapy, rather than a mere recital of fact. In the telling of war stories, and instruction in their telling, O'Brien shows that truth is unimportant in communicating human emotion through stories.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein). War can be a drastic change for the life of a person as war can ultimately morph them into a slave of the battlefield. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O’ Brien describes the experiences of people in the Vietnam War and how they have become changed individuals from their past lives before combat. War pummels you with things that transcend your typical escapades and the more you try to understand them, the more you get sucked into the void of combat. The increased time the characters are in the battlefield, the more they have to think about it, thus shaping who they are. Only time can determine how much war can affect you.

The Vietnam War began in 1955 and ended in 1976. The North Vietnamese government and the Vietnamese Congress fought against France and then America, and eventually against South Vietnam to reunify Vietnam under communist rule. In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, he tells some of his experiences during the Vietnam War. During the war, he learns that it’s not only the violence that makes war such a dreaded experience, but the intangible weight that each soldier carries.

People view war in a variety of different viewpoints. Not everyone believes it is negative. In the novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’brien explains his perspective on war. He believes that many people are quick to brush away the fact that war is truthfully an astonishing event.

When O’Brien said “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (pg.68). You can relate this to when O’Brien talks about the village they called an airstrike on. This happened after a sniper tried firing at them. In this little story, you see no kind of lesson that makes you a better person in the end.

When reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, there were many truths that were presented and while some were actual facts, others were fictional. The author uses the art of storytelling instead of mere recital of facts, generic when telling a war story, as a way to express unexplainable emotions. O'Brien shows that the truth is unimportant in communicating human emotions through stories because there are some emotions that can not be explained through mere facts.

I have experienced love, lost, and the slimmest of experience of realizing that you fallen and that you now have to pick yourself back up and try again. I empathize with Jim Cross from the short story “The Things They Carried” for all the emotions he goes through while living in the purgatory that is called war. From the sentence, where Jim Cross looks back at a moment where Martha and he were at the movies, ”when he touched her knee, she turned and looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back(P.3),” it becomes clear that the aim of the flashback was to solidify the reader’s understanding that Jim’s love is unrequited. Throughout high school I was in love with my best friend, which turned out to be unrequited also. I was in absolutely despair and heartbroken, but the love that was there, throughout all the pain it brought me, was a gift.

Finding the Truth Within the Fiction in The Things They CarriedAlthough there are many themes displayed throughout the stories told by Tim O’Brien inThe Things They Carried, none of them will have the intended impact on the audience if theylack the ability to separate the truth from the fiction. Interpreting this truth throughout the novelmay be hard due to the often made-up recollections rather than factual events, which often resultin a lack of respect for the accounts being presented. However, once the reader can comprehendthat not all of the stories are true, yet the emotions always are, a new appreciation for the storieswill be found as well as a deeper comprehension. Tim O’Brien’s recollection of his time spentfighting the war in Vietnam is not always completely truthful, but truth can always be found inthe book through the emotions and morals that come along with his blunt, brutal stories.

As one soldier enters the war, another soldier departs physically, but very rarely does he depart mentally. Once left the battlegrounds, tales good and bad are told, altered and passed down for a lifetime, whether in art, speech, or writing. It is not the way a narrator tells a story that evokes the desired emotion; it is when the narrator is so vulnerably honest with the audience that he or she can convey the truth. It is not always graphic descriptions and gory images that best depict the idea of war to various ranges of audiences. Although some critics interpret Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, as an absence of straightforwardness regarding emotion in war, it entices to those who are engrossed in the murky minds of soldiers

In this article Helen Parshall argues that it is necessary for people to use fiction to tell a story about war, such as in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien which she read in high school. Fiction can capture the feeling and emotion of the war soldier's experience. Helen Parshall has recently graduated from college and the Vietnam war is not her area of expertise. This article is not from an academic publication and is also a .com. Parshall’s work might be more of an opinion than facts. O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried support the claim of Helen Parshall because he used fiction to tell his story about the vietnam war. It is impossible to understand war unless you experience it, like in O’Brien’s work when he says that he is the only