When I began reading "The Things They Carried," all I was looking for were
truths and lies; evidence of things we have been “told” to look for—shocker.
Before “The Things They Carried” even begins, the prologue claims: “those who
have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once,
and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one
who experienced them to the fullest.” Does this mean O’Brien wants us to
believe everything in this book? Because the back of the book claims this is
fiction.
Who am I to believe?
As far as my knowledge of the Vietnam War goes, the book
seems accurate, but we must keep in mind that, no matter how real O’Brien makes
it feel, it is still a work of fiction.
When the chapter “How to Tell a War Story” begins, the first
sentence is “This is true.” Assuming this entire chapter tells the truth, does
this mean we should read the entire book through this lens? Assuming the
stories he tells are only true—truth in this case being what seemed to be true
at the time—if they do not make us feel uplifted at the end and are not moral.
O’Brien even says that if we believe a war story we should be skeptical; what
seems normal may not be true and what seems insane might actually be true.
I do not know about you, but I am already confused. Trying to understand what is true and what
seemed to be true and what is entirely made up is driving me insane, but it
does make reading a lot more interesting.
I too have found that "what seemed to be true" is a difficult concept to wrap your head around. I think of it as the way one person's perception of an event could be entirely different from someone else's, even though they were also present. He mentions the way in which we miss things, like in the blink of an eye of facing away from something that is hard to watch. This may be where the discrepancies lie, in how each person fills in those blanks.
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