I
decided to reread parts of The Things
They Carried keeping in mind everything we already discussed in class about
truth and the way Tim O’Brien portrays the truth in his book. As I read through a few chapters I
questioned what the importance of truth is to the book. The narrator, Tim O’Brien is constantly
repeating how he remembers this and that and mentions on multiple occasions how
something is true, very matter of factly.
After I reread “How To Tell A True War Story” and in particularly the
story Mitchell Sanders shares about the soldiers listening in the mountain, I
realized that Sanders is desperate O’Brian to believe his story the same way
the author O’Brien is desperate for his readers to read his book as though it
is true.
The
truth is very relative. Whether
you read the book as true or not, the importance is what you take away from
it. O’Brien writes the book making
a the main character a construct of himself and a story line based off of an
actual war so the readers are forced to find more truth in the story than there
might actually be. If The Things They Carried is an outlet for
the real Tim O’Brien to rehash his past, than he is constructing a piece of
fiction made to seem true for his readers to feel empathy and understanding.
You make a good point here, and one of the most important takeaways from reading the novel, in my opinion. O'Brien's main concern has nothing to do with the factual truth. Even though the reader may be fooled into thinking that the stories are actually true, what matters most to O'Brien is not to tell a true story. The lesson he tries to teach us is that even though the stories are fiction, the emotions that they evoke are real and true. In this way, I like how O'Brien makes telling a story a two-way street; I think the reader plays as much of a part in engaging in the story as the author.
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