The Thing They Carried

The novel The Thing They Carried is a compilation of short stories that share underlying themes and characters. One of the stories is called “How to tell a True War Story”. In this story the narrator expands on a central theme of the distinction between truth and fiction when writing a war story. The story, like most of the other stories in the novel jumps erratically between events, which oftentimes creates confusion and a sense of the surreal in the story. Throughout the story the narrator repeatedly shows that when writing a war story the “story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.”(O’Brien pg. 171) This quotation encompasses the theme and supports it. The narrator’s use of stylistic devices coupled with stories such as “How to Tell a True War Story” and “Good Form” exemplifies how fiction can fully represent the truth whilst the facts fall miserably short.

The narrator recounts the story of how Curt Lemon dies to support his statement that “it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.”(O’Brien pg. 68) When Curt Lemon dies, the narrator uses vivid imagery to describe the scene as “almost beautiful”: “…the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.”(O’Brien pg. 67) The imagery and personification present in the story makes it seem surreal. However, the narrator explains that when someone dies, people only see bits and pieces of the whole picture as evidenced by when the narrator reports, “you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again”(O’Brien pg. 67). Because of this, what actually happens becomes “jumbled” and influences the stories that soldiers tell, making the stories seem fake. This...

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...ents a story truth, one that tells the truth in regards to sensation and emotion. This is represented when the narrator says “makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard exact truth”(O’Brien pg. 68). O’Brien shows that it matters not that a story is fiction, so long as it represents the truth as it seemed.

The novel The Thing They Carried is a compilation of short fiction that explores the theme of the distinction between factual truth and story truth. The quotation in the short story “How To Tell a True War Story” distinguishes between what is true in a war story and what is not. This quotation, through the use of figurative language, imagery and other stylistic devices makes the reader reconsider the meaning of truth in a war story. The quote sums up a central idea of the short story collection and gives meaning to the events in the book.