The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
“In war, truth is the first casualty”. These words by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus show how the nature of war hasn’t changed in the last two thousand years. During times of War truth gets very muddy and hard to understand, it becomes hard to separate what really happened to what seems to have happened. Ambiguity is the common denominator of every War. “The Things They Carried” is a book about the Vietnam War, but it is also a book about Storytelling itself, and how this one is based on deception and manipulation of the truth. To be convinced by this claim the reader needs to know the origin of the short story form and its essence. Then the reader will analyze the nature of “The Truth” in a literary work. …show more content…
One could say that the short story lies between the Novel and the Anecdote. It draws from the same pool of literary techniques as the Novel, but it has the impression of spontaneity of the Anecdote. But the most important aspect of the short story is that it developed from the storytelling tradition, which is by definition unreliable. From this statement one could say that the essence of the short story is storytelling. Hence, it shares this unreliability with the oral tradition; and this is where the true virtue of “The Things They Carried” lies (in both meanings of the word). “The Things They Carried” is a story about storytelling itself and its blurry nature, and it follows the very unreliable and murky essence of any oral tradition. This introduces the next topic to be analyzed: The Truth, or reliability, in a literary
“In war, truth is the first casualty”. These words by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus show how the nature of war hasn’t changed in the last two thousand years. During times of War truth gets very muddy and hard to understand, it becomes hard to separate what really happened to what seems to have happened. Ambiguity is the common denominator of every War. “The Things They Carried” is a book about the Vietnam War, but it is also a book about Storytelling itself, and how this one is based on deception and manipulation of the truth. To be convinced by this claim the reader needs to know the origin of the short story form and its essence. Then the reader will analyze the nature of “The Truth” in a literary work. …show more content…
One could say that the short story lies between the Novel and the Anecdote. It draws from the same pool of literary techniques as the Novel, but it has the impression of spontaneity of the Anecdote. But the most important aspect of the short story is that it developed from the storytelling tradition, which is by definition unreliable. From this statement one could say that the essence of the short story is storytelling. Hence, it shares this unreliability with the oral tradition; and this is where the true virtue of “The Things They Carried” lies (in both meanings of the word). “The Things They Carried” is a story about storytelling itself and its blurry nature, and it follows the very unreliable and murky essence of any oral tradition. This introduces the next topic to be analyzed: The Truth, or reliability, in a literary