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Ideologies In The Things They Carried, By Tim O Brien

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When referring to a narrative fiction, an ideology can be described as a dominant set of attitudes, values and beliefs informing the reader. The novel The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien is a collection of interrelated short stories that challenge many principal ideologies relating to a culture, place or time. Ideologies are formed by a dominant social class and represent an abstract meaning for a cultural, political and societal principle. O’Brien presents the reader with a set of beliefs from the time period, however he challenges these ideologies, and presents them in a new light. O’Brien challenges the principal ideology about the importance of the USA’s involvement in the Vietnam War and its necessity to resolve the threat of communism. …show more content…

The idea is constructed and told partly from O’Brien as a soldier, reliving stories from his experience in Vietnam, and partly from his manipulation as a storyteller, and his ability to deliberately construct a view about an event. There is a dominant thought that stories about a war time, are written from facts and personal experiences, exploring the realities about war and constructing a truthful image for the readers. However O’Brien contradicts this argument, by blurring the distinction between fact and fiction. He describes how to “generalise about war is like generalising about peace. Almost everything is true” yet “almost nothing is true.” O’Brien’s role as a storyteller illustrated how he has the power to shape the readers experiences and opinions through his deliberate form of writing. His purpose in combining fact and fiction in the story is to illustrate that the unbiased truth about a war story is less significant than the act of storytelling. “In any war story, but especially a true one, its difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” Ultimately the prevailing ideology that all war stories are constructed to the objective truth is challenged in ‘How to tell a true war story’ as O’Brien reveals the importance of storytelling and the impact it can play on the ideas

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