Important Quotes From The Things They Carried

In the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien we learn about O’Brien and his soldiers during the Vietnamese war. The Vietnamese war was a deadly and very costly war between the North Vietnam and their communist allies versus the Southern Vietnam and the United states. Throughout the novel Tim O’Brien narrates many stories about the war. Stories about traumatic incidents, pleasant occasions, sorrowful events, and even peculiar event. Personal accounts about himself and also tells about experiences his fellow soldiers faced. In the novel we learn that the true purpose of his anecdotes is not to derive a moral lesson or to be factually accurate, but to connection his personal emotions toward the war to the readers.
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It is obvious to see that even he is conscious of his hyperbolic details. For example, in My Khe he talks about how he killed a soldier. Nonetheless, whether he actually killed a soldier or not is not important, what is important is his emotions towards the wars
In the section called “Notes” Bowker sends Tim O’Brien a letter asking for O’Brien to tell him a story because he wants to vent his feelings and frustrations but is stumped on how to word it. Because of this task, Tim O’Brien begins to mediate on his abilities to tell stories after. He begins to view his storytelling in different ways specifically as a coping apparatus for the traumatic occurrences he faces in the war. He talks about story telling by the purpose and impact of stories.
Tim O’Brien states, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (O’Brien 208)” This statement strengthens Tim O’Brien’s stance on the main importance of telling a story. The factual truth is not relevant in comparison to the emotions that the story triggers from an

These suggestions that O’Brien continually makes forces the reader to whether the details and people placed in the story change the impact on of the event. These commentaries made by Tim O’Brien are alludes to the notion of the power of emotional truth over factual truth.
It is obvious to see that when these stories are being told that there is not much truth placed in them. For instance, Sanders confesses that he fibbed about a few aspects of his story about the men who heard voices in the jungle. He continues by saying that he lied in order to better emphasize his main point. Regardless, Sander’s story is still legitimate. Theses fibs are caused by the settings that the soldiers are placed in. The uncanny and mysterious silence of the forest causes the soldier’s thoughts to run wild. They imagine images that are for more glorious and dramatic then the actually