The Things They Carried 5 Paragraph Essay

The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, written by Steven Kaplan, questions if there is any sense or meaning derived from what happened during the Vietnam War and how that could be conveyed to those who have not experienced the war. Literary critic, Philip Beider’s, writes “most of the time in Vietnam, there are some things that seemed just too terrible and strange to be true and others that were just too terrible and true to be strange.”(American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam 4). Kaplan believes that by destroying the fine line between fact and fiction, fiction can often sound truer being, presented as meaningful.

Kaplan’s statement is correct because the language of fiction is the most accurate for conveying what is attempted to be explained. O’Brien uses these what-ifs and maybes as if they were facts, and then calls these facts into questions. O’Brien explains in The Things They Carried that it is impossible to know “exactly what had happened to me”(The Things They Carried 179). The over-used phrase “there it is”(The Things They Carried 212) is said by the American soldiers to make the

In the chapter How to Tell a True War Story, O’Brien includes us through several different variations of how character Kurt Lemon died, each version being more uncomfortable from the next. O’Brien introduces this chapter by saying “This is true.”(The Things They Carried 64). However, the only thing true about these stories is that they are being altered right in front of us. According to O’Brien, you only “tell a true war story” “if you just keep on telling it”.(The Things They Carried 91). For O’Brien it is not the facts that makes a story worth remembering, but that a story becomes part of the present so “there is nothing to remember except the story”( The Things They Carried