Truth in The Things They Carried by Tim O´brien

809 Words2 Pages

In Tim O’Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried,” imaginations can be both beneficial and corrosive. This novel consist of story truth and real truth. Throughout the novel, imagination plays a big role. Tim O’Brien wrote his book about the war mainly based on his memory of the war. He did not remember every details of the war, thus he made up some false details to the stories to make it seems more interesting. He wants the readers to be able to feel how he felt and understand how everything happened as he tells the story. He wants to provoke the emotional truth. O’Brien tries to prove that imaginations is not completely a bad thing and that it is also a good thing. O’Brien starts to create stories about what could have happen and what he could not do at the war in addition to the original war story. With the power of imaginations, O’Brien is able to talk about something that he could have done but did not do in his past. Imaginations helped him escape the reality. Imagination has the job of finding the real truth, attempting reconciliations and creating reality.
O’Brien shows that imagination can help us do things that could not be done in real life. According to Tobey Herzog, “O’Brien invents a soldier-author narrator, also named Tim O’Brien, to tell stories of his life and Vietnam War experiences, to relate war stories told to him by other soldiers, and to comment on the art of storytelling…” (104). Tobey Herzog is saying that O’Brien was able to invent another version of himself in the novel so he would be able to tell stories of his life and also other characters’ life stories. O’Brien tries to invent something that he has never done before. When O’Brien got drafted to the war, he did not want to go. He uses his story chara...

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...se people from the troops may be made up as well. Sometimes it is difficult to be able to tell the difference between reality and fantasy because everything feels so real. O’Brien made everything flow so well that it was hard to be able to tell what really happened and what was made up. In “Good Forms” O’Brien admit that the story he told about Bowkar was slightly different from the real truth story. Therefore, imaginations can give us false belief.
Overall, imagination can result in a positive way and a negative way. Imaginations allow us to become a whole new person. Just like how Tim O’Brien used imagination to create a whole new himself. It gave him the power to do anything he want to do such as looking at dead bodies and being able to actually kill someone. O’Brien shows us the power of imagination and storytelling through his novel, “The Things They Carried.”

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