Truth In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

In life people are taught to always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Lying is morally wrong which is why most people avoid it. Writers, on the other hand, find honesty not only unnecessary, but damaging. Therefore, “lying” or “twisting reality” is the only alternative if not the better one. Avoiding the full truth is incredibly beneficial to a story because of what it provides for the reader.

The truth plays little to no part in a truly good story. Mostly, there is one main difference between good stories and bad ones; the use of facts. Poor storytellers get hung up on every inane detail of the truth, good storytellers provide room for interpretation by the reader (McLeod). By focusing more on feeling and not the truth, readers are able to connect more with a story. If the pure facts are predominant, a story becomes too exact, boring even. In Tim O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried,” Tim remembers his friend Norman wanting Tim to write a story about him. The first version ended up being a disappointment, so Tim rewrote it and said “The piece has been substantially revised,

[through] severe cutting, in other places [through] addition of new material” (O’Brien). He stresses that it is a much better story with all of the revisions from the truth. By “lying,” the story grew to be better, more honorable, and more memorable. The basic fact is that facts dull out stories.
Something uncommonly known is the vast separation between memory and truth, and how they should interact in a story.

In fact, “The brain fills in information that was not there” from inference or speculation (Fraser). Nothing the human brain remembers is 100% true, it is incapable of storing that much detail. Every memory is a story constructed from fragments of fact, the rest is all made up. For example, memory researcher Daniel L. Schacter states that the brain "Knit[s] together the relevant fragments and feelings into a coherent narrative or story” in order to store them as memories (Murphy & Doherty). It is impossible for someone to tell a completely factual story unless it was written in the moment. All “true” stories are only based on the truth because the ones that are true aren’t worth telling. There is no such thing as an honest memory or a true

story.
Authenticity, a part of every good story, comes from undisputed origin, but is altered with feeling. Namely, O’Brien states that “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” in his book “The Things They Carried” (O’Brien). Happening-truth is fact, but genuine truth requires feeling and embellishment to make it real. Story-truth is “fact,” feeling, and fiction all at once. That makes it real. In the same way, exaggerating allows the writer to draw the reader’s attention to what is most important (McLeod). This helps the reader understand what the story really means. By over exaggerating more important aspects of something, people direct more attention to that aspect. Thus, allowing their minds to think more critically about it. People get a better understanding of something the longer they have to ponder over it. So, readers will better understand a story if their minds are more focused on the important exaggerations, rather than the trivial details. Overall, authenticity has no connection to truth or fact, but is still what makes a story genuine.
Neither the writer nor the reader benefits from sticking to the truth when storytelling. Facts dull out a story, make it less relatable, and ultimately take away from its overall message. Amazingly, the statement “Lying is wrong” is conditional along with most things. The question “Is lying bad?” isn’t always black and white, just like stories.