Truth and Lies in The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried clearly contains a theme of blurred lines between falsehood and actuality, which is shown immediately within the first few pages. Jimmy Cross is a war lieutenant who is responsible for the particular group of soldiers but believes his fantasies of a girl named Martha have distracted him from performing up to his full potential and ultimately caused the death of lavender. O’Brien is already leaking fantasies and untruths into reality, causing real and tragic events in the story. Through these fantasies and stories, O’Brien is also commenting on life at war and the absolute necessity of relying on false stories for physical survival. The dynamic tension between truth and lies is already apparent in the novel and is also exemplified in the narrators’ metaphorical descriptions of the soldiers and the things they carried. Although the facts of what the men were actually carrying can be taken as truths, O’Brien doesn’t only mean to tell us mundane facts about the items in the men’s packs, he is expressing deeper meanings about the individuals that are shown through the objects. O’Brien is not technically lying to us but is telling us facts while he really wants the reader to pick up something deeper. It seems as though O’Brien has the tendency to hide complex ideas throughout tedious events, which can certainly be interpreted as another form of lies.