A memoir, or a biography with some degree of fiction, can sometimes hold more truth than a factual account of actual happenings, as O'Brien proves in The Things They Carried. However, Frank Fink's piece of jewelry serves as a different sort of fictional truth.
Both Childan and Tagomi are deeply affected by the art before them, though they lead completely separate lives and hold completely different positions in the world. Both men deal with the sales of faux-American artifacts, but when they run across the jewelry, they can immediately tell it is something different, something real. Like O'Brien's story-truth, this art is a kind of truth, something universal and honest in a world of falsities. Like O'Brien's story-truth, like Tim trying to save Timmy with a story, "art is long, stretching out endless..." (Dick, 184). You could consider art to be false, because it's not something real, it's (usually) not a photograph or an exact representation of the truth. Because it is seen through human eyes and made from human hands, it is truer than the happening-truth.
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