And then, fiction becomes reality.

This video directly reflects on the themes of this course and especially on The Things They Carried. I suggest you watch the whole video (it is 6 minutes long)! Here is some important dialogue:

At 1:44--

The guy: "If you could have a memory of anything, real or not... what would it be?"

The girl: "A fake memory? You don't make any sense."

The guy: "I've always been good at that."

At 2:29--

The guy: "What if we had a chance to remember things that we never actually experienced?"

The girl: "What good is it if it never actually happened? No one would believe it."

The guy: "You'd believe it. It's about the feeling--that's what matters."

The girl: "The problem is... I like my stories based on reality, and you like fiction."

At 5:32--

The guy: "And then, fiction becomes reality."

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Much of the dialogue in this short film parallels both class dicussion and what we have seen in The Things They Carried.

Some of us relate more to the guy in this video: he is very abstract and does not care about the distinction between reality and fiction. As he says (much like in classroom dicussion), "It's about the feeling--that's what matters." Yet, others (such as myself) get caught up in reality, much like the girl in this video. I like my stories based on reality, and it's harder for me to care about the story or meaning if it is not true in the sense that it did not happen.

The climax of this video is the greatest connection to The Things They Carried; a fake, fiction story becomes a reality. I think this is a great characteristic of both this novel and this video. In The Things They Carried, the reader is aware that the novel is purely fictional. However, Tim O'Brien does a damn good job of trying to make this fiction become reality. He blurs so many aspects of real life to make his story extremely credible. For example, Tim O'Brien (the author) uses his own name as a character in the story; this makes the reader believe that everything that happens to Tim O'Brien (the character) happened to the author. Furthermore, Tim O'Brien uses other real people, such as his daughter Kathleen--this gives the story more and more credibility. The dedication to the novel is probably the most convincing fiction and reality blend. Tim O'Brien the author dedicated this novel to the fictional characters of his story.

Whether it is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or Wong Fu's Shell, the topics we discuss in class are motifs that each of will encounter in most storytelling. How important is reality in a story? Does it matter if you cannot tell the distinction between what happened and what did not happen?