It’s pretty incredible, actually.
After reading the first 30 pages of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I finally discovered that this book is a
work of fiction. The label, fiction, dramatically alters both the tone and my
perception of O’Brien’s creation. His writing, while lauded for its accuracy by
those with war experience, remains a lie and a situation created, not observed.
As a historical piece, how can The Things
They Carried function as informative account? How can its accuracy be
judged if it has none to begin with? Certainly, based on the provided reviews,
O’Brien crafted a situation that accurately describes the ambiance of war, but
to what extent is the environment reliable? As I see it, it’s impossible to
distinguish between the research O’Brien presumably collected and the
imagination of a writer obsessed with the romance of modern war.
In contrast to such confusion, O’Brien
builds his novel on the specific data, exact weights, measured to the tenth of
a pound. Whether accurate or not, the measurements of tangible baggage add a definite
ethos to The Things They Carried.
Such intimate numbers imply a direct connection to the front, providing a platform
from which to explore the intangible emotional weight of the primal monotony
that consumed Vietnam.
I also didn't realize Tim O'Brien's work was fiction right away. The beginning seemed memoir-like because it seemed to have real life stories of war, so I was confused as to what the genre was, but didn't think about it too much. I finally stopped reading and tried to figure out what the genre was after I got to the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story". I think the environment he describes is quite reliable because even though the book is fiction, O'Brien is a war veteran who experienced these things first hand. Finally, I agree with you that the detail he puts into the first chapter adds to the reliability of the story.
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