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Ambiguity In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

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. The Things They Carried is about Tim O’Brien, the author, and all of his stories while in the Vietnam War. Most of his stories do not have any truth to them but show the paradox war has to offer. These stories bring love, guilt, beauty, gruesomeness, and ambiguity which all tie together what the Vietnam War was and how it affected O’Brien and his fellow soldiers. Although most of the stories O’Brien tell are not true, they still contain love, guilt, and the ambiguity a true war story needs in order to have an effect on the people he’s telling them to. Throughout the book, O’Brien tells many different stories about himself and his buddies during the war. He says true war stories have a certain fell to them. According to O’Brien, true war stories don’t generalize and will …show more content…

They never have just one meaning or a meaning at all. The stories also don’t tell just one story about war. They have elements of beauty and gruesomeness; love and guilt; lucidity and ambiguity. After O’Brien tells a story about soldiers on a mountain, he says “In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning” (74). Sometimes true war stories are hard to tell because of this factor. The stories serve the purpose of helping people understand what war is really like. Not everyone will be able to understand the story if it doesn’t have a clear moral. It’s hard to extract something to learn from these war stories so people feel they are not worth telling or listening to. He also says, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But

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