“William Timothy O’Brien is a renowned American writer, famous for writing novels on the Vietnam War.” (FamousAuthors). One of his most famous novels is called “The Things They Carried.” O’Brien was born on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. He grew up in Worthington, where that city played an important role in shaping his imagination and developing his artistic sensibility. Although O’Brien was against the war, he was conscripted into the United States Army and sent to Vietnam where he served for two years. Tim O’Brien faced many obstacles and learned a lot about himself and other people when he went to war. “In the Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien shows the reader that storytelling is extremely powerful in ways that can help
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One review is from a library database by Maria Bonn. This article expresses an awesome critical review on Tim O’Brien’s story, The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien tells us at the beginning of the story “the things they carried,” an installment of his literary exploration of the terrain of the Vietnam War, “But this too is true: Stories can save us.” In the article, it states that at times, O’Brien has expressed concern that the literature of the Vietnam War, a literature dominated by author-veterans, might be “held prisoner by the fact of [the author’s own] Vietnam experiences. The result is a closure of the imagination, predictability and melodrama, a narrowness of theme and an unwillingness to stretch the possibilities. In the article, Tim O’Brien argues that writers must be less concerned with the facts than with the truth and that “lying is a way one can get to a kind of truth.” This article states that O’Brien has a belief that fiction has a greater potential for conveying essential truth than does nonfiction is one he has arrived at by working through his own personal experience. O’Brien is very conscious of his position as an intermediary between those with personal knowledge of the war and those without. He is the one who has been there and back; he has lived to tell the …show more content…
This article shows why the story “The Things They Carried” is the most anthologized story ever written. In his most recent work, the things they carried, Tim O’Brien takes the act of trying to reveal and understand uncertainties about the war one step further, by looking at it through imagination. In the first chapter, an almost documentary about of the items referred to in the book’s title, O’Brien introduces the reader to some of the “things,” both imagery and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average foot soldier had to carry through the jungles of Vietnam. All of the “things” are depicted in a style that is almost scientific in its precision. In the article and book, we are told how much each subject weighs, either psychologically or
One review is from a library database by Maria Bonn. This article expresses an awesome critical review on Tim O’Brien’s story, The Things They Carried. Tim O’Brien tells us at the beginning of the story “the things they carried,” an installment of his literary exploration of the terrain of the Vietnam War, “But this too is true: Stories can save us.” In the article, it states that at times, O’Brien has expressed concern that the literature of the Vietnam War, a literature dominated by author-veterans, might be “held prisoner by the fact of [the author’s own] Vietnam experiences. The result is a closure of the imagination, predictability and melodrama, a narrowness of theme and an unwillingness to stretch the possibilities. In the article, Tim O’Brien argues that writers must be less concerned with the facts than with the truth and that “lying is a way one can get to a kind of truth.” This article states that O’Brien has a belief that fiction has a greater potential for conveying essential truth than does nonfiction is one he has arrived at by working through his own personal experience. O’Brien is very conscious of his position as an intermediary between those with personal knowledge of the war and those without. He is the one who has been there and back; he has lived to tell the …show more content…
This article shows why the story “The Things They Carried” is the most anthologized story ever written. In his most recent work, the things they carried, Tim O’Brien takes the act of trying to reveal and understand uncertainties about the war one step further, by looking at it through imagination. In the first chapter, an almost documentary about of the items referred to in the book’s title, O’Brien introduces the reader to some of the “things,” both imagery and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average foot soldier had to carry through the jungles of Vietnam. All of the “things” are depicted in a style that is almost scientific in its precision. In the article and book, we are told how much each subject weighs, either psychologically or