Truth In Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

Darkness of Light, Memory of Loss

The mirror that reflects you is the truth and the darkness that shines through is your reflection that finds light within war and that light within war is the truest love story ever told. In the nonlinear novel, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien focuses on what a true war story is and how to differentiate between a lie and a truth, which to believe and the difference between story-truth and happening-truth. Tim O’Brien uses his skill in storytelling to convey his memories to people who have not fully experienced the Vietnam War first hand.

In the chapter “On the Rainy River,” the power of embarrassment is stronger than the cheers from a crowd after a home run ball is thrown by morality and crosses the rainy

I was once a soldier. There were many bodies… but I was young and afraid to look… now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (O’Brien 172). That is what he had seen and what he had felt. The purpose of a happening-truth is to feel what he felt. This is where story-truth comes in, “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty, young man of about twenty… His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him” (O’Brien 172). The purpose of a story-truth is to make his readers see what he saw, his memory, and whichever truth is told alters the answers to questions. Without them, there would almost be no point in asking questions, because there would be no truth to tell, all memories would be a

In this chapter, O’Brien takes his daughter out on a mini field trip in Vietnam to the place Kiowa died. He told his daughter the simplified story-truth of it all, “‘this whole war… why was everybody so mad at everybody else?’ I shook my head. ‘They weren’t mad, exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing’” (O’Brien 175). O’Brien’s daughter, Kathleen, wanted answers, but, not to just any question. She wanted to why; a question that her father had no answer to. Later on the trip, Kathleen’s father went for a swim in the field to put his memory of Kiowa’s death to rest, “roughly here… where Mitchell Sanders… found Kiowa’s rucksack… I reached in with the moccasins and wedged them into the soft bottom, letting them slide away” (O’Brien 178). No matter how many times O’Brien’s daughter asks him why he cannot let go of the past, he almost always answers with a story-truth. With his readers, it is both, so we can also slide away with the moccasins and his