The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: Narrative Analysis

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of fictional stories in and about the Vietnam War. O’Brien is a Vietnam veteran and wrote this book after his time serving in the military. He uses his understanding of the traumatic experiences that happen in war and how they stick with people in order to paint realistic depictions of soldiers in Vietnam. These stories are all written from different viewpoints with different narrators, and when read consecutively show how narrators affect the meaning of stories. In the book The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien uses multiple distinct narrators in order to analyze what the point of a story is at its core and how stories are affected by the people that tell them.

Throughout the book, many

In this chapter O’Brien completely challenges the readers idea of what makes a story, using a story about Rat Kiley killing a baby water buffalo in order to make his point. He tells ways that one can tell if a war story is true, if it is too crazy to believe or if there is no coherent meaning. Then O’Brien describes how the buffalo story isn’t true at all “It’s all made up.”(O’Brien 81) He talks about how while none of the details of this story were true that it is still a true war story due to the fact that a veteran just keep on telling it. The truth in the characters, setting, and other parts of the story don’t matter as long as they are able to do what any good story does, teach the reader something. O’Brien says that when telling a war story “All you can do is tell it one more time… Making up a few things to get at the real truth.”(O’Brien 81) This illustrates how the details of a story that a narrator is able to create can only help the reader come to the “real truth.” The details a narrator decides to put in a story have no purpose other than steering the audience towards the final point of the narrator. When it comes to stories, the details are everything and while a storyteller may think they have crafted a story perfectly to convey life in war, another lady might just feel sad about a buffalo dying.

The narrator can keep things from the reader or lay the facts out right in front of them but it all depends on the reader of the story and what they take away from the story. Storytelling is an art that only some understand, Tim O’Brien being one of them, and he uses his knowledge of storytelling in order to create very realistic narrators in The Things They Carried. These narrators, one of them being O'Briens Fictional self, are able to compose a meaning out of the most pointless story of wartime high jinx and destructive behavior. These stories make it impossible to find the meaning without looking at the person who is giving the information. Everyone's feels different ways about different stories and looking at the perspective of the narrator of the story will allow any person to decipher the true meaning the narrator wanted to