Truth In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

The Things they Carried is seen as one of the most honest depictions of the Vietnam War that has ever been written. Tim O’Brien has a way of creating Vietnam around the reader. However, despite the clear depiction of war, this novel raises the question, “What is true?”. Through analyzing this novel, it is clear the author believes that the happening-truth of a story is far less important than the emotional-truth. One of the central chapters of the novel is titled, “The Man I Killed.” However, only a few chapters later, O’Brien reveals that the events of that chapter hadn’t happened. Though the chapter specifically said that Tim killed the man, he hadn’t actually been the one who threw the grenade. O’Brien used this to explain that a true war story might not have happened, but
O’Brien claimed Kiley always exaggerated stories, because the plot wasn’t what matter, the emotions of the story were what mattered. Kiley was written as a metaphor for how O’Brien wrote. O’Brien doesn’t need the details to be right, as long as the reader feels the emotion of the story. Sanders often told stories the same way, because he was afraid people wouldn’t understand the story unless he made some details up. After he told a story about how the mountains made music, he came back to Tim to say that not all of the details were true, just like how Tim O’Brien explained the details of “The Man I Killed” weren’t true. O’Brien was constantly answering the question “What is truth?” with a little shrug, then saying what the reader felt in their gut was the only true part. O’Brien not only raised the question of “What is truth?”, but also tried to answer it. He got frustrated in his chapters because he knew how many people wouldn’t get his stories, so he used Kiley and Sanders as symbols of himself as a writer. But he knew that the emotional truth is always the most important part of the