The role of story telling in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is almost as complex as figuring out a riddle. There are meanings hid within meanings of a story, which makes it hard to understand the importance of a specific story trying to be told. Stories not only play an important role in this novel, but also for many people in real life. Author Tim O’Brien believes that: “story telling has the power to give life to those that have passed on” (O’Brien). The concept in this novel tells a story, which is in the actual text of the novel, but there is also a hidden story within that story. The novel suggests that it is important to continue to tell stories; by doing so someone’s life lives on, someone’s legacy lives on, someone’s contribution to our world lives on. Through stories, generations of people will learn about tales of survival, triumph, and failure. By listening to the stories in the novel readers are challenged by having to decide whether the author is telling a true war story, based upon its detail, or one that is not true. Tim O’Brien does this by not having a clear fence between non-fiction and fiction, he believed that: “telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat…it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what happened to me…all the mistakes id made, all the terrible things I had seen and done” …show more content…
Specifically in this novel, stories played a large role, which was to distract the minds of uneasy soldiers. Distract their minds from the possibility of death, their obligations, and whether or not they’d make it back home. When receiving a letter from a friend named, Norman Bowker about his guilt, O’Brien took this opportunity to support his belief that the most important part of a story is not its truth, but how the story makes one