The Magic of Stories

          “By telling stories you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened…and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (O’Brien 152). This quote really stuck out to me while I was reading. I feel like it kind of encompasses a central theme in the book. The book is written like a collection of short stories that blur the truth and the lies. But I don’t think the point is to try to decipher what is actually true in the stories. I think the point is that the stories make the reader feel something. The stories still have significance despite any exaggerations or lies. What O’Brien seems to be getting at is that there are emotional truths in stories that are of more value than the actual truths. One example of this occurs when Sanders tells a story about music that a troop hears one night. However, the next day he tells Tim that not everything in his story actually happened, they didn’t hear any kind of music but they did hear odd noises. What is important is that the listener understands the toll that nights in the jungle had on the men.

O’Brien further discusses the magic of stories when he talk about the death of Linda. He states that, “in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story miracles can happen” (224). O’Brien seems to create an illusion to help him cope with what happened to Linda. In his stories she doesn’t have to be dead. His written fiction can transcend her death. O’Brien keeps all of the people he has lost alive in his stories—Curt Lemon, Lavender, Kiowa. All the friends that he lost are immortalized in his writing. This idea is occurring within the story, but it is also occurring outside of it. Tim O’Brien the author (rather than the narrator) is also immortalizing his characters. In a way they live forever inside the pages of The Things They Carried. All his characters will be the same no matter who reads the book in the future. They have their own forever within the pages. That’s the power of storytelling. That’s the magic. Like O’Brien says, stories are for eternity.