Metafiction In O. O Brien's The Things They Carried

Register to read the introduction… Have you ever told a story, but adjusted some of the finer details in order to make it more appealing to another? People do this. It is just human nature to try and convince someone else that the event was genuinely intriguing. O'Brien does this within the storyline of The Things They Carried, by using metafiction to distinguish his storytelling and how to tell stories according to his thoughts. "By telling Stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain." (pp.180-181). In the process of storytelling, O'Brien wants the reader to understand that people tend to exaggerate occurrences that didn't happen in order to explain the …show more content…
O'Brien uses this technique in The Things They Carried, while also explaining through the use of metafiction why people do this. "The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed" (pg. 78). Sometimes things happen to us so quickly, that when we tell the story, it isn't exactly right when it does come down to the cold hard facts, but it as true as anything that we will ever know. Stories are not totally fact, but with interpretation they can lead us to factual events that do occur. O'Brien may have adjusted some details from his actual experience in Vietnam and deemed it a ‘fictional' book, but to him the stories he tells in The Things They Carried are very real to him. And through the use of metafiction he is able to convey this to his