Theme Of Storytelling In The Things They Carried

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Throughout Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, a plethora of stories are told concerning the lives of a select number of soldiers in and out of the Vietnam War. In his writing, O’Brien also conveys his own thoughts on the art of storytelling and the nature of stories themselves. In these passages, O’Brien provides a detailed analysis of the challenges of storytelling, the effects of time on memory, the role of imagination in storytelling, the reason for retelling a story, and a story’s purpose and process for the reader. In his assessment of storytelling, O’Brien highlights the challenges of telling stories by including many tales that take place after the Vietnam War. For example, back in America, the soldier’s of Vietnam found …show more content…

According to O’Brien, after something occurs, it becomes difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen as time moves along. In “How to Tell a True War Story,” he explains that “when you go and tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue” and that “the pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot” (71). In these two quotes, O’Brien is essentially saying that the greater amount of time that passes, the more obscure a story is in O’Brien’s memory. This effect that time has on memory seems to largely contribute to O’Brien’s ideas on the difference between story-truth and …show more content…

In much of The Things They Carried, stories are retold time and time again. One reason for this is the idea of keeping a story’s story-truth alive. In “Good Form,” O’Brien differentiates what he calls story-truth from happening-truth. Story-truth seems to give us a better understanding of O’Brien’s sentiment in a particular story even though the story itself may not be true at all. On the other hand, happening-truth is what actually happened in the story, but may not contain as much emotional authenticity as story-truth. According to O’Brien, story-truth is therefore truer than happening-truth. Relating back to storytelling, O’Brien retells stories continuously to maintain their sentiment and emotional value. Without this continuous repetition, this sentiment fades away and the emotional value of the story is lost. Another reason stories are retold in The Things They Carried is to cope with the past and make the teller feel for the story again. For example, O’Brien retells Linda’s story to cope with her tragic death and make her seem alive again. In “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien explains that, when he retells a story where someone in it is deceased, “the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world” (225). Essentially, by retelling stories, the teller can summon people who have died in their past and make them seem not quite so

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