Truth and Storytelling in O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, O’Brien explores the nature of stories and what role truth plays in being able to deliver a story and convey its weight to an audience. Throughout the course of the novel O’Brien gives many accounts and his characters recount many tall-tales as well. All of these stories pose questions to the reader, and O’Brien contends that a story’s purpose is to help the audience member feel the reality of what happened and remember those who have died. Rat Kiley has a propensity for exaggeration and O’Brien states that the other platoon members has become conditioned to discredit about 60% of everything he said. For example, if Rat said he had slept with four women, it was safe to assume he slept with about one and a half. This aversion to the truth and compulsion to magnify the facts, however, was not meant as a device to deceive. His story in which a squad of men go up into the mountains to a listening post and start hearing cocktail

In his last chapter O’Brien weaves a tale of when he first fell in love at the age of nine and how, although she has now departed the land of the living, he can still remember her and keep her alive through telling stories about her. In just the same way he can honor and remember those lost in Vietnam by recounting their exploits. These stories, regardless of their historic accuracy, serve to awaken the memory and kindle the emotions so that the dead may live on in the memories of those who loved them. That is the power of a story. O’Brien’s The Things They Carried asks the question of what stories are and their function. Throughout his novel and the character tales within it he unravels a story’s ability to tell the emotional truth of an event—even at the expense of the historical truth—and its power to keep the dead alive in the hearts and minds of those who remember