'The Things They Carried By Tim O' Brien

“The Things They Carried” Analysis

In “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien structures his novel in a way that opens up into a deeper perspective than what is typically perceived at first hand. The structure of the novel reaches beyond storytelling, but rather a blend of fact and fiction in order to establish the relevance of telling stories and less about the actual, hard truth. The obscure structure of the book supports the epistemological feel, how the novel consists of short stories, essay, anecdotes, and other forms of writing. The novel is not so much written as a historical document, but more on the imaginative side of things with hints of autobiography. As O’Brien narrates these stories, there’s a greater meaning behind these stories

This implies that stories have a much greater significance than merely sharing an experience. It produces an experience and develops it in a manner that makes it feel less in the past. “Practically everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language” (Richter 809). This expands on O’Brien’s quote and structure throughout his novel and how this “expressed language” is the stories that O’Brien tells to throughout his novel and how this “expressed language” is the stories that O’Brien Tells to create the deeper meaning and draw more attention towards the importance of these stories and less about the realism or truthfulness of the stories. O’Brien creates a deeper meaning in more than just the relevance of the

As O’Brien narrates his novel with these imaginative stories, he implements a series of deeper meanings behind every story, telling another story or truth beyond the initial story. “As a result, the stories become epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the ways of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and visions” (Calloway, 249-250). O’Brien’s stories become differentiation between justified truth or opinion and create multiple perspectives to engage the reader into a process of imagination to determine what is true. As O’Brien carries out the novel, it doesn’t center around a “true war story” or “historical document,” but combines the concepts of fact and fiction in order to distinguish what is true and what it means for a story to be declared true or not, as well as the relevance of a story being told. “If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the fiction in order to write history, O’Brien’s narrator also makes liberal use of history to develop and organize the fiction” (Silbergleid, 129). He utilizes the “truth” of history, his stories, to develop the “fiction” of the novel, the other more profound features of his stories that should be