Truth And Fiction In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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The genre of fiction encompasses an imaginative narrative, providing a quixotic escape for the reader that is artistic and inventive at best. It is a “made-up” illustration that allows its audience to relate to experiences that they will likely never be forced to encounter. Yet to fictionalize a historical record authenticates such literary adventures. Fictionalized history creates a carefully devised fantasy that, when inlaid with aspects of realism, exaggerates a stark reality. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien blurs this already thin line between fact and fiction, employing literary tactics such as storytelling, an unreliable narrator, and metanarrative to emphasize the contrast between truth and falsehood, in order to provoke …show more content…

The narration of real events blended with fictional additions, and vice versa, is inconsequential compared to how the moral of each story resonates with the reader. Plots and ideas get made up in order to “get at the real truth” (O’Brien 81). The ““story-truth” has little to do with the reality of war. Instead, the onus is on the reader to determine the value of the work in her own life, to make sense of the connections arising from intense conflict” (Smith 116). The stories become true depending on the varying emotional response of the reader, coming alive under the canopy of personal experience and individual reaction. It is dependent on the reader to tease out the moral of each vignette, “like the thread that makes the cloth, […] unraveling the deeper meaning” (O’Brien 74). A true war story, like those within The Things They Carried, cannot be taken at face value. They are far more profound than just being about war. “It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow” (O’Brien 81). A true war story is not true at all, unless, the reader is able to identify the different personal, emotional truths within them; the truth is fictionalized so that it can be accessible to vaster audience of readers, so that it could mean

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