Lying Really Isn't That Bad of a Habit

The trouble with lying is that it can never be truly fabricated. It's the all too familiar scene where your parents ask you where you were and you pause a second too long just because you have to pull an answer from nowhere. That's why the truth stings so much. When people lie to you they give you that second to get ready, to prepare, but with the truth is automatic. It hurts more because you have no time to anticipate the coming sentence and the emotions come from a place of power. When Tim O'Brien makes scenes up or plays with the truth or whatever else he is doing in The Things They Carried he pulls everything from an emotional truth. Every emotion in this book truly happened in the war and I think that is what matters.

My favorite chapter in this novel is probably "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" because you never know if it happened or not and you never know if whether it happened or not matters. O'Brien frames it that way in the text, "Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me" (O'Brien, 85).   Despite his statement of plausible deniability, I feel the story is full of truth. It reeks with the loss, craziness, joy, and submission that war (drawing from other novels and films not personal experience) brings. I think truth does not lie in facts, but in how the presented story makes you react. Throughout this novel, O'Brien plays with how strong facts actually are and I think this chapter is a great example of how it is not the fact of the matter but the emotion of the matter that makes a difference in the truth of the novel.