Accuracy in Carried

"Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor." Throughout the novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, it is difficult to separate what is true and what is made up. O’Brien writes of two truths, the “happening-truth” and the “story-truth”. The “happening-truth” is the actual events that occurred in Vietnam. The “story-truth” is how O’Brien reshapes his stories so that readers can feel what he felt in each situation. Although it may not be what really happened, it portrays the true feeling for those who cannot be there to experience it. Tim O'Brien experienced many situations that many have never thought about. Although O'Brien invented many of the stories, he creates images and ideas that make the reader feel what he felt during his time at war.

As an author, his job is not to tell what happened, but to tell the story where the reader feels what he felt going through the villages in Vietnam and fighting on the front lines. For those who never went to war, the feeling of hiding and almost being blown into pieces does not exist in their minds. They will never share the share experiences that Tim O'Brien went through as he served his draft. With each story, Tim O’Brien expresses a certain feeling. In the story, “The Man I Killed”, although the events never occurred, the reader does not know it at the time. He imagines the life story of the young man. The young man is not a communist nor a fighter. He pictured the boy's life, that he loved to learn and avoided the politics. "He [the boy] imaged covering his head and lying in a deep hole and not moving until the war was...

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...g during the war. Tim O'Brien doesn't write about black and white of what is true and what is not, but of the gray fog in between. Even though each story is separate, they come together to express how stories rule our lives. What is written down in words is what others hear and is passed down. "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present…I can make myself feel again." His main purpose is to make a person feel something about what the characters are going though. It is not everyday when one comes home from war. The only way to preserve the memories are to write about them in a story. This novel may appear to be a simple story about a platoon of soldiers while in Vietnam. As the book progresses, the weight of the war starts to dwell on the reader. The powerful emotional content grows as the narrator gets more courage to talk about the horrors that occurred.