Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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War is a topic that is particularly hard to understand without firsthand experience. All that the average person can learn about what it’s like to fight in war is through the stories of soldiers. However, these stories are not typically as glorious or exciting as one may believe. They are often tragic and inconclusive. Tragedies do not always have a lesson to be learned, and that is what Tim O’Brien is trying to express through his novel The Things They Carried. War stories are hard to tell because they have no morals or lessons. All they are is the experiences of boys who were forced to fight in a hopeless war. They are the only thing these soldiers have to show for their efforts, and O’Brien is no different. One of the earliest stories O’Brien …show more content…
As O’Brien tells it, Lemon and Kiley are messing around one day, as they normally do, and as Lemon walks out of the shade, he steps on an explosive trap that kills him. That’s all there is to it. There was no heroic self-sacrifice or glory, Curt Lemon only happened to step on an explosive. The purpose of O’Brien including this story was to prove a point: there is no morality in war stories. There was no reason Lemon had to die, but he died anyway, and those around him were forced to grieve and move on. Concerning Lemon’s death, O’Brien says, “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.” Rat Kiley, with no proper way to grieve, shot at a baby water buffalo and called Lemon’s sister a cooze for not responding to his heartfelt letter. He lost his best friend and had no one to blame. Even though it was a story that took place during the war, it wasn’t about the war. It was about love and loss and tragedy. There was no lesson to learn, and there was no happy ending. Even though there is typically no moral in war stories, that doesn’t mean soldiers won’t try to make them interesting. To make things entertaining for themselves, soldiers often exaggerate …show more content…
However, he later says that this didn’t happen as he first claimed at all and that he made the most of it. He says he does this because “I want you to feel what I feel. I want you to know why the story-truth is truer sometimes than the happening-truth.” O’Brien felt that his mere presence made him guilty of that man’s death. He didn’t kill him— he didn’t even know him— but he felt as if he did, and that is what he was trying to convey. That is what makes a war story so hard to tell; it’s difficult to make someone experience what was felt without bending the real truth. No one will be able to experience what those soldiers went through. Even Tim O’Brien, a phenomenal author, had to bend the truth to convey what he and his fellow soldiers felt. He has admitted that in numerous stories his retelling wasn’t the full truth, but at the same time, he was telling his truth. His goal wasn’t to find some hidden meaning through his writing, or to entertain his readers. Like Mitchell Sanders, he could’ve tried to hunt for one or tried to find some purpose for what he experienced, but he
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