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

The Things They Carried Truth, Fiction, and Hu humans Emotion There ar umpteen levels of truth in Tim OBriens 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 argument in their telling, OBrien shows that truth is unimportant in communicating human instinct through stories. OBriens writing style is so vivid, the reader frequently finds himself accept the events and details of this novel as absolute fact. To contrast truth and fiction, the compose inserts reminders that the stories are not fact, but are mere representations of human emotion incommunicable as fact. OBriens most direct controvertion of truth appears in reasoned Form. He begins with, Its time to be blunt, and goes on to say that everything in the guard but the very premise of a foot soldier in Vietnam is invented. This comes as a shock after reading what seems to be a stylized presentati on 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 rough his partially in the war. In discussing this, OBrien presents an elaborate picture of the storys development and the main characters real-life expiry Speaking of Courage was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three 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 purpose of story-telling. Contrasting truth and fiction, OBrien shows that the truth cannot always convey human emotion. OBrien s personal guilt at seeing a man die from a grenade blast is real, and must be communicated as such in a story. Norman Bowkers guilt at seeing Kiowa pass by 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 elementary 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.