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How Does Tim O Brien Show Perception In The Things They Carried

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War Blurs Perception Tim O’Brien has written multiple war stories such as The Things They Carried, If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, and Going After Cacciato. When writing war stories, Tim O’Brien style is a blend of reality and fiction that is influenced by his experiences in vietnam. In The Things They Carried O’brien discusses two types of truth, which are events that actually happened and events that are fictional but represents themes that took place during the war. O’Brien says that the fictional truth is sometimes more realistic than what actual truth because fictional truth has more emotion to contribute to a story. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried creates a thin barrier between fact and fiction while conveying the themes of war in each story. The most prominent way O’Brien displays fictional truth is through having fictional characters in each story but the theme and emotions behind the story are real emotions felt in war. O’Brien shows that his stories have fictional characters by having the narrator say, “I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt …show more content…

Most of the time the characters fabricate parts of a story that did not happen because of emotions they feel. In the story of Kiowa’s death, the main perspectives given are the young soldiers and Jimmy Cross’. They both blame Kiowa’s death on themselves and they remember things that didn’t happen because of the guilt. To show that Jimmy Cross is handling with the guilt the narrator says, “But Lieutenant Jimmy Cross wasn’t listening. Eyes closed, he let himself go deeper into the waste, just letting the field take him. He lay back and floated” (O’Brien 169). In the young soldier’s case he blames Kiowa’s death on him turning on the flashlight instead of it most likely being a random casualty of

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