The Thing They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

Storytelling has been around for generations, folk tales passed down from generation to generation. Some stories have particular truths and lies to teach lessons and or skills you might need to know in order to understand the stories. This is the same for the book The Thing They Carried. In this story the author Tim O’Brien tells about all his different stories from the vietnam war. Some of these stories are from his point of view and some are not. But he also gives pointers on telling stories and how to know when they are real or fake.

In this story Tim tells about criteria to follow if you wanna hear a true war story. “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggests models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things man have always done.” To make this a little simpler these are just stories that you have to choose if they are true or not. This is something you should feel in your heart if a story is real or not that tells you to believe it. But either way it goes this is still storytelling at it’s finest.

These stories started to become part of these guys as they got deeper and deeper into the war. Also The longer the war went on the longer and crazier the stories got. ”Vietnam …show more content…
He also uses specific details to help you believe or not believe the story he tells. “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 happen, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but nonetheless help to clarify and explain.” So he uses these stories as a way to not think about what really happened in the war. He plays around with the truth and fiction to make the story how he wants