Truth and Fiction in O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'

The author, Tim O'Brien, is writing about an experience of a tour in the Vietnam conflict. This short story deals with inner conflicts of some individual soldiers and how they chose to deal with the realities of the Vietnam conflict, each in their own individual way as men, as soldiers.

The Vietnam War that commenced on November 1, 1955, and ended on April 30, 1975, took the soldiers through a devastating experience. Many lost their lives while others maimed as the war unfolded into its full magnitude. The book Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam by Bernard Edelman presents a series of letters written by the soldiers to their loved ones and families narrating the ordeals and experiences in the Warfield. In the book, Edelman presents the narrations of over 200 letters reflecting the soldiers’ experiences on the battlefield. While the letters were written many decades ago, they hold great significance as they can mirror the periods and the contexts within which they were sent. This paper takes into account five letters from different timelines and analyzes them against the events that occurred in those periods vis a vis their significance. The conclusion will also have a personal opinion and observation regarding the book and its impacts.

According to the Library of Illinois, “primary sources of information are those that provide first-hand accounts of the events, practices, or conditions you are researching.” There is no portion about reliability or the significance of truth within the explanation of a primary historical source. O’Brien’s recollection of his first-hand experience in the Vietnam war is a good primary source because highlights the collective consciousness of America during the war, the collective memory of the soldiers who fought, and the emotional things they had to carry with them through the remainder of their lives.

While the Vietnam War was a complex political pursuit that lasted only a few years, the impact of the war on millions of soldiers and civilians extended for many years beyond its termination. Soldiers killed or were killed; those who survived suffered from physical wounds or were plagued by PTSD from being wounded, watching their platoon mates die violently or dealing with the moral implications of their own violence on enemy fighters. Inspired by his experiences in the war, Tim O’Brien, a former soldier, wrote The Things They Carried, a collection of fictional and true war stories that embody the

As many have noted, O'Brien ingeniously facilitates a mood of incongruity, or disconnection, between fiction and fact in The Things They Carried through sheer structure. By blurring lines between fantasy and reality, THINGS truly becomes a contradiction of itself. As Catherine Calloway notes, one of the ways in which O'Brien achieves this blurring of lines, is to model the narrator of THINGS after himself, a drafted Vietnam war veteran, a Harvard graduate, and a writer with the same name of Tim O'Brien (para. 3). O'Brien is aware that the practiced reader knows not to confuse the narrator with the author, and yet the reader is encouraged to do just that. The purpose, of course, is to keep the reader as unbalanced, as unsure, of what we are told to be truths, as is the Vietnam soldier.

In the first chapter of the short story, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, every character carries literal figurative things with them. Each item they carry has a significant meaning that helps them keep their mindset straight and their psychological well being intact. The soldiers are in war, most likely they are all scared of death. They need something on their mind to make them happy and also help them survive further on with the war. That is why Tim O’Brien’s piece is a perfect example to read, to learn more about some of the burdens that may be in some soldiers.

Sentence Summary: Daniel Robinson’s essay, “Getting it Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O’Brien” delineates O’Brien’s style of writing which focuses on the aspects of Vietnam, that tell more than the actual facts can. Robinson alludes to the idea that O’Brien’s stories revolve around the emotions and feelings of the characters as they journey through the years of the war, rather than the actual events of the war itself.

As the book by O'Brien The Things They Carried continue plus the short stories from Patriots, it made me think more and more about the purpose of the war and the consequences of the war on soldiers. The war started because of the political disagreements and because of that, people had to go and fight for their country's standpoint. According to the O'Brien book, when he is visiting Vietnam after the war, his daughter asked him: "This whole war, why was everybody so mad at everybody else?" and he answers her, "They weren't mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing (175)." The whole conflict was based on disagreement, that Vietnam wanted to be independent does not matter who is going to help them to reach

Very few novels and short stories have managed to clarify, in any lasting process, the means of the war in Vietnam for America and for the troopers who served there. With ' 'The Things They Carried, ' ' author (Tim O’Brien), captures the war 's pulsing rhythms and trying dangers. However he goes abundant any. By moving on the far side the horror of the fighting to look at with sensitivity and insight the character of affection, courageousness and worry, by questioning the role that imagination plays in serving to make recollections. This paper examines the condition of love, shown through intimacy, separation, fantasy, in constitution with the reality of and a going war.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a fictional book consisting of different stories from Vietnam war. Tim O’Brien was trying to convey the real perspectives of the war to his readers by telling facts and stories through his personal memories he got from the war, and how things effect them and their life after the war. In order to express the tension in the war, O’Brien depicts the experience of the soldiers by showing the different ways of expression of male love from these soldiers. Although there are many forms of friendship, some of which may vary from place to place, the friendship in the war is the most unique one. As the definition of Friendship, Friendship is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an association. The bond between soldiers is more intense and real, and this is also the message that Tim O’Brien shows in his book by using metaphor, details depicting and technique of repetition.

I really like your point about the way how we remember and how we interpret history. I think in the context of the war the way, how the stories are told, is influenced by the subjective view of soldiers. Most of the soldiers in Vietnam were really young and the war is traumatic in itself and it influenced their perception of some situations. As O'Brien describe in his book The Things They Carried, the death of Curt Lemon, how he does not remember if it was true or not. "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen (O'Brien, 67)." However, even the description of the stories is not exactly true, the war changed their lives significantly and what happened them in Vietnam is something

The Vietnam War is a conflict that was extremely polarizing to people in the United States and words such as ‘wasted’ or ‘quagmire’ are negative words associated with the war. In his book A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo provides a personal account of events that he experienced leading up to and during the war as a soldier in the United States Marine Corps. Caputo’s experiences transform his idealistic views of war when he is faced with the realities of combat, and ultimately the events cause him to change his opinion about the necessity of the war.

My fascination with the Vietnam War began when I went on holidays and crawled into the tunnels tight enough to make even a small eight year old claustrophobic. I wondered how adults survived in the war by using this tunnels. This personally influenced my perspective on the Vietnam War and marked my interest in this piece of history. In my Preliminary HSC Advanced English classes I was told to choose a political perspective in poetry. I chose Levertov, who wrote about the effects of the Vietnam War on people. In my Extension One English classes I learnt about literature as a representation of the author’s culture. These two main ideas and childhood interest in the Vietnam War became the starting point for my Major Work.

According to Freud, ‘the mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water’ . Through the psychological lens that looks at the submerged part of the ‘iceberg’, one understands that repressed fear and trauma never cease to exist in the war participants’ lives. The novels present to readers not only the gruesomeness in Vietnam’s combat zones, but also the internal battle that the soldiers and veterans keep fighting days, months and years after the immediate traumatic experience. To them, the war indeed never ends.

Forty-two years has passed since the Fall of Saigon 1975, yet still the Vietnam War and its aftermath are not to be forgotten. The first of the wars to be publically broadcasted earned the Vietnam War the name “Television War.” Despite the public’s division on the war, young men filled with patriotism and purpose went off to war. These men were unsure and unskilled to survive and fight in the jungles of Vietnam. Soon, the war proved to be more than a physical battle, but one of mental endurance as well. Novels such as, Falling Through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni and Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes allow for a different interpretation of the war. The novels expose the world of the characters, where readers gain an understanding of the characters’