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

The Things They Carried: Truth, Fiction, and Human Emotion  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   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. O'Brien's writing style is so vivid, the reader 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 not fact, but are mere representations of human emotion incommunicable as fact. O'Brien's most direct discussion of truth appears in Good Form. He begins with, "It's 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 after reading what seems to be a stylized presentation of fact. In the sequence of Speaking of Courage followed by Notes, O'Brien 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, O'Brien 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 O'Brien is asked to write a story about his part in the war. In discussing this, O'Brien presents an elaborate picture of the story's development and the main character's real-life demise: "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... ...O'Brien 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, O'Brien shows that the truth cannot always communicate human emotion. O'Brien's personal guilt at seeing a man die from a grenade blast is real, and must be communicated as such in a story. Norman Bowker's 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, O'Brien 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 Cited: O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990.