O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”

Truth in Things They Carried Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is a set of short pieces that tell narrates the stories of soldiers in Vietnam during, before and after the war. He depicts how the war was cruel and how it lead to many adverse effects on people. The narrator illustrates the ambiguous and surreal nature of the war, the alienation in the Vietnam War as well as the inadequacy of facts in the communication of various essential truths. According to O’ Brien, there is the truth as we live it and as we tell it, but these two are not compatible all the time. According to him, there are times when a story’s truth can be truer than the happening truth. In “The Things, They carried” there is a blurry distinction between truth and fiction.
O’Brien in “The Things They Carried” uses metafiction to draw a line between the truth and fiction. The book relies on the supposition that truth depends on the situational context and what is going on in the person’s mind. According to Patricia, metafiction is a fictional writing which systematically as well as self-consciously shows that it is an artifact to elicit questions about the relationship that exists between reality and fiction (Waugh 69). In his dedication, O’ Brien gives his dedication to Noman Bowker, Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Mitchell Sanders, Rat Kiley, Kiowa and all the men of Alpha Company (O’Brien 7) This seems odd as all these are fictional characters in the book. He wanted to trick the readers into believing that they were real people when in the real sense, they were just fictional characters.

The real intention may have been to dedicate the book to all the Kiowas, Crosses and Rileys of the world, i.e., the soldiers who dedicate their lives to protect their countries (Ruta et al., 15). The belief that the characters are real would also make the reader have a sense of attachment to the characters and as a consequence love them as well as the story more than if they out rightly know they are fictional.
The author also wants the readers of his book to believe that everything he was saying in his book was true. He emphasizes that the stories he is narrating as well as ideologies he is giving are true. For example, when narrating his story of what happened to At Kiley, he says, “I’ve told it before- many versions, many stories, but this is what happened.”(O’ Brien 78) By saying that he had told the story many times, he implies that it was fictionalized. However, by adding that was what happened, he wants to show the reader that what he is saying is the real truth. This is meant to cause confusion in the reader’s mind and make him analyze what to believe but finally, affirm that the story is true. The author intends to distinguish the actual truth with what he wants them to believe is true in the midst of the blurry line (Robin 189).
Although we know that the stories in the book are just fiction, the author goes ahead to emphasize that everything in them was truthful. This is purposes to inflict a sense of uncertainty in the audience. This uncertainty would be comparable to the uncertainty that the new recruits felt while in battle in Vietnam (“Metaphorically Speaking: Embodied Conceptualization and Emotion Language in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried” N.p). According to the recruits, blood was being shed for no clear reason; there was no justification for it as per history or law. They wondered whether it was a national liberation, a civil war, who stated, why and when and whether it was according to the Geneva accords (O’ Brien 122).
The book is based on the author’s memories and experiences from the war that makes the description of events in the war seem real and easily acceptable to the reader. There is also a clear blur between what is real and what fiction in the book is. The author makes everything to appear as true though much of it is fiction. This makes the reader trust the story and keenly read it to the end.
Works Cited
Blyn, Robin. “O’brien’s The Things They Carried”. The Explicator 61.3 (2003): 189-191. Web.
“Metaphorically Speaking: Embodied Conceptualization And Emotion Language In Tim O’brien’s The Things They Carried”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 4.5 (2015): n. pag. Web.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 1st ed. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
Ruta, Suzanne et al. “The Things They Carried”. The Women’s Review of Books 19.2 (2001): 16. Web.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. 1st ed. London: Methuen, 1984. Print.