Unreliable?

In every high school English class I took, we touched on the topic of unreliable narrators. We read novels told by narrators that could not be trusted; narrators whose word we could not take for granted. Within the first few chapters of the novel The Things They Carried, we are presented with obvious clues that the narrator is not going to be a reliable one. One of these hints is at the end of the second chapter when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross asks the narrator to, when he writes his book about the war, make Cross "out to be a good guy." (O'Brien, 29) The narrator seems to accept this request, promising not to divulge something that Cross wants to keep secret, and I, as the reader, immediately become suspicious of this narrator. Is he going to be telling us the whole story? Or is he going to pick and choose what to include in order to manipulate us into viewing the situation in a certain way? Later on, these hints become much more blatant. O'Brien, the narrator, clearly states that he finds it difficult to remember large portions of the war, and that war stories are generally told as they seemed to happen, not how they actually happened. He says, "the angles of vision are skewed" (O'Brien, 69) because soldiers "tend to miss a lot" (O'Brien, 69) in the midst of all the loud noises and commotion. When I first started the book, little alarms would go off in my head whenever I came upon one of these clues, and I would remind myself that this speaker was not to be trusted. However, as I read on and thought back to reading this book during my freshman year of high school, I started to question why I found this so alarming. Does it matter that stories might be told as they seemed and not completely factually? Personally, I think this way of telling stories is more effective because people will almost be able to experience the moment as if they were the person telling the story. To be able to give us the true feeling of being in the war, O'Brien needs to manipulate us with slightly less true stories. After coming to this realization, with O'Brien's help of course (see pgs. 79 and 80), I decided that, in this case, it doesn't matter whether or not the narrator is reliable. He is trying to depict the truth of what it is like to be in the war, and the truth that the untrue stories provide is what really matters.