OBriens Things They Carried Essay: Truth, Fiction, and Human Emotion

The Things They Carried Truth, Fiction, and Human Emotion There are many levels of truth in Tim OBriens The Things They Carried. This novel deals with story-telling as an act of communication and therapy, quite than a mere recital of fact. In the telling of war stories, and instruction in their telling, OBrien shows that truth is unimportant in communicating human emotion through with(predicate) stories. OBriens writing style is so vivid, the ref frequently finds himself accepting the events and details of this novel as absolute fact. To contrast truth and fiction, the author inserts reminders that the stories are non fact, but are mere representations of human emotion incommunicable as fact. OBriens most point discussion of truth appears in Good Form. He begins with, Its time to be blunt, and goes on to say that everything in the book but the very premise of a foot soldier in Vietnam is invented. This comes as a shock later reading what seems to be a stylized presentation of fact. In the sequence of Speaking of Courage followed by Notes, OBrien adds a second dimension of truth to a story so vivid that the reader may have already accepted it as the original truth. In Notes, OBrien steps out of the novel and addresses the reader to discuss the character, Norman Bowker, and the formation and history of the previous story, Speaking of Courage. In a letter from Norman Bowker, Tim OBrien is asked to write a story about his rive in the war. In discussing this, OBrien presents an elaborate picture of the storys development and the main characters real-life demise Speaking of Courage was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who one-third years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMC... ...OBrien goes beyond the telling of war stories in The Things They Carried to say something larger about the art and intention of story-telling. Contrasting truth and fiction, OBrien shows that the truth cannot always communicate human emotion. OBriens personal guilt at seeing a man die from a grenade deck is real, and must be communicated as such in a story. Norman Bowkers guilt at seeing Kiowa sink into the muck leaves him with a sense of direct personal failure. By incorporating this sense of failure into fictional events, OBrien is able to communicate the true human emotion behind the story, rather than just the facts. Above and beyond a simple set of war stories, The Things They Carried reduces fiction to the very heart of why stories are told the way they are. Works CitedOBrien, Tim. The Things They Carried.New York Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990.