In the end, the only thing that matters is how it makes us feel. This novel is meant to make the reader feel. Regardless, we will still attempt to dig into each individual story and figure out how it is a tool to get across some theme and Tim O’Brien will cringe. It doesn’t matter if The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories or a novel, because, as a whole, it follows the definitions of a true war story: there is never a moral, it cannot be believed, it does not depend on truth, and most importantly, it makes the stomach believe. O’Brien is like Sanders in his storytelling, in that some things may be embellished and sometimes he interrupts his own story, but the point of it is to make us “feel the truth, to believe by the raw force of feeling” (70).…