The Things They Carried: Truth, Fiction, and Human EmotionsThere are many levels of truth in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This novel approaches the story as an act of communication and therapy, rather than as a simple report of facts. In telling war stories and instructing in telling them, O'Brien shows that truth is not important in communicating human emotions through stories. O'Brien's writing style is so vivid that the reader often finds himself accepting the events and details of this novel. as an absolute fact. To contrast truth and fiction, the author inserts reminders that stories are not facts, but are simple representations of human emotions that are incommunicable as facts. O'Brien's most direct discussion of the truth appears in Good Form. He begins with "It's time to be blunt" and goes on to say that everything in the book, except the very premise of an infantry soldier in Vietnam, is made up. This comes as a shock after reading what appears to be a stylized presentation of the facts. In the Speaking of Courage sequence followed by Notes, O'Brien adds a second dimension of truth to a story so vivid that the reader may already have accepted it as the original truth. In Notes, O'Brien steps outside the novel and turns to the reader to discuss the character, Norman Bowker, and the formation and history of the previous story, Speaking of Courage. In a letter from Norman Bowker, Tim O'Brien is asked to write a story about his role in the war. Discussing this, O'Brien presents an elaborate picture of the development of the story and the real-life death of the main character: "Speaking of Courage" was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room. of a YMC... half sheet... O'Brien goes beyond the telling of war stories in The Things They Carried to say something larger about the art and purpose of storytelling. By contrasting truth and fiction, O'Brien shows that truth cannot always communicate human emotions. O'Brien's personal guilt at seeing a man die from a grenade explosion is real and needs to be communicated as such in a story. Norman Bowker's guilt at seeing Kiowa sink into the mud leaves him with a direct sense of personal failure. By incorporating this sense of failure into the fictional events, O'Brien is able to communicate the real human emotions behind the story, rather than just the facts. Beyond just a series of war stories, The Things They Carried strips the fiction down to the real reason why stories are told the way they are. Works Cited: O'Brien, Tim. The things they carried. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990.