Lies Create Emotions

The stories that O’Brien tells in The Things They Carried become part of his own history because they reflect his emotions in regard to difficult incidents that occurred. The novel represents “story truth” (179), according to O’Brien’s memory because recollections are always colored and flawed. The hybridization of truth and fiction make the existence of a younger Tim possible, from before the war. The stories also function as an outlet for his feeling about the tragedies that he encountered.

The events in O’Brien’s life are burdensome, making it necessary for him to create a narrative to cope with the real events around him. O’Brien explains that when someone dies, either a fellow soldier or enemy, the men pretend that the body is “not really a body […] its easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse” (238). Similarly, the soldiers pretend a dead body is not a body in order to cope with the traumas of war, as O’Brien is uses the novel as a coping mechanism. By repeating and rewriting his ideas throughout the text, he is able to fully comprehend them himself. 

The stories that O’Brien invented save his younger, innocent self. During the draft for the Vietnam War, men between the ages of eighteen and twenty were primarily those going off to battle. It is difficult to consider an eighteen-year-old boy a man, which is exactly the message O’Brien is trying to convey. The narrator explains that the soldiers felt like children in Vietnam, by Azar stating, “Christ, I’m just a boy” (37). By writing The Things They Carried, O’Brien is “[realizing] it is Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (246). The stories permit Timmy to survive since he was very immature when he first went to war. O’Brien is using his novel to explain to the reader that stories save people’s lives.  Not only do O’Brien’s stories help him cope with his trauma, they saved the life he was never able to fully live because he lost those years due to war.