The Things They Carried: Truth, Fiction, and Human EmotionThere are many levels of truth in The Things which they carried from Tim O'Brien. This novel treats storytelling as an act of communication and therapy, rather than simply recounting facts. By telling war stories and teaching their storytelling, 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 reminds us that stories are not facts, but simple representations of human emotions incommunicable as facts. O'Brien's most direct discussion of truth appears in Good Form. He begins with "It's time to be frank" and goes on to say that everything in the book, except the very premise of an infantryman in Vietnam, is made up. It's a shock after reading what appears to be a stylized presentation of the facts. In the sequence of Speaking of Courage followed by Notes, O'Brien adds a second dimension of truth to a story so vivid that the reader may have already accepted it as the original truth. In Notes, O'Brien steps outside the novel and addresses the reader to discuss the character, Norman Bowker, as well as 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. In discussing this, O'Brien presents an elaborate picture of the story's development and the main character's actual demise: "Speaking of Courage" was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who hanged himself three years later in the locker room. of a YMC... in the middle of a sheet of paper...... O'Brien goes beyond telling war stories in The Things They Carried to say something broader about art and the purpose of the story. By contrasting truth and fiction, O'Brien shows that truth cannot always communicate human emotion. O'Brien's personal guilt over watching a man die from a grenade explosion is real and must be communicated as such in a story. Norman Bowker's guilt at seeing Kiowa sink into the mud leaves him with a sense of direct personal failure. By incorporating this sense of failure into fictional events, O'Brien is able to communicate the real human emotion behind the story, rather than just the facts. Beyond just a collection of war stories, The Things They Carried strips fiction down to the very heart of why stories are told the way they are. Works Cited: O'Brien, Tim. The things they carried. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc.., 1990.