In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we found that the idea of truth played a significant role in the novel. While reading, we came across this idea a number of times; however, the idea was a bit unclear. This is because O’Brien creates two truths- “story truth” and “happening truth.” These two truths left us wondering what was real and what was imaginary, but as we read, we found it difficult to distinguish between the two. We realized that since Tim O’Brien is a post-modernist writer, the idea of truth is difficult to define in his novel. There are several times in the text where the line between truth and storytelling is difficult to identify. An example of this is in his story “Notes.” O’Brien writes “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (158). O’Brien admits to making up truths, which made the line between truth and fiction hard to define. Because of the indefinite line between the two, this passage led us to believe that there was a connection between truth and storytelling. However, we were interested to know just what this connection was.
The fact that O’Brien uses two different truths could lead the reader to have confusion when trying to connect the two ideas or when trying to understand what’s fact and what’s fiction. O’Brien jumps between “happening truth” and “story truth” throughout the entire novel, yet doesn’t create a definite separation between the two. The passage from “Notes” creates confusion because O’Brien admits to taking factual stories and twisting the truth of the actual events so he can develop his own stories. This made it difficult to distinguish between true stories and fictional stories while reading the novel. The Things They Carried is filled with these blurred and unclear descriptions of truth, which led us to believe that there was a deeper meaning and a greater significance for them other than simply creating confusion.
This confusion led us to the question “What is the connection between the way O’Brien handles ‘truth’ in The Things They Carried and his desire to communicate to his readers the value of storytelling and reading stories?” Once we developed this question and began our research, we found that many of the authors were saying that there was, in fact, a direct relationship between truth and storytelling in The Things They Carried. Many of the authors suggested that O’Brien had an emotional motivation for linking the two concepts. Others proposed the idea that Post-Modernism drove O’Brien to create an indistinct idea of truth. Other authors felt that O’Brien was merely trying to get readers to understand that truth can be skewed depending upon the person and the situation. Whatever the case, all of the critiques we read believed that O’Brien had some sort of purpose behind his storytelling and simply desired that readers understand the value of truth and stories and the link between the two.
