The Question of Whether Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried' Complies or not to the conventions of the memoir genre is a complex matter simply because it is a novel that deliberately blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The stories are based on real events, but hide behind the facade of pieces of fiction, causing a phenomenon known as narrative truths. This makes the novel feel like a memoir. Tim O'Brien paradoxically challenges both the conventions of a memoir and those of a novel, but in this essay the focus will be on how he challenges the typical characteristics of the memoir genre. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay The episodes, classified as a novel in the paperback edition, recount the experiences of a platoon in Vietnam, sharing their emotions, sometimes black. humor and their faults. It is structured as a series of short stories interspersed with the same characters, with each story developing the experiences of each soldier. O'Brien's stories move back and forth in time, creating a memoir-like feeling. It is also a tool that O'Brien uses to access different types of truth by presenting his experiences in different ways. Such informal structure is often prevalent in memoirs. Perhaps the most remarkable convention of a memoir—telling the story in the first person—is found in “The Things They Carried.” For example, "On Rainy River", a short story about Tim O'Brien traveling to Canada with the intention of escaping the draft, is narrated in the first person by a character named after the author . This perpetuates the blurring between fiction and truth since it gives the text an autobiographical character, while the story is paradoxically classified as fictional from the start. In fictionalizing the events depicted in the novel, O'Brien has given himself carte blanche to explore his feelings and personal truths rather than what actually happened - he is able to distinguish between what actually happened happened during the Vietnam War and what seemed to happen of its own accord. own point of view. Despite the fact that the author and narrator seem similar, the narrator continually seeks to question the veracity of the stories he has told both from memory and rumor. For example, in "The Man I Killed", O'Brien's character begins to imagine a life eerily similar to his own for the soldier he killed: "the young man would not have wanted to be a soldier and would have been afraid in his heart. poor results in combat” (p. 133). This quest for truth on his part leads readers to follow a similar path. For example, when O'Brien describes the fear and shock he felt after killing another soldier, he leads readers to believe him. However, he then questions the soldier's mere existence, which once again seeks to undermine the veracity of the accounts. The motivation behind such suspicious contradictions is to emphasize the insignificance of factual truth and to highlight what, for O'Brien, is actually important: the act of telling a story. Another common characteristic of memoirs is that readers are often not told how the author felt about any event that occurred. Instead, they are shown through both dialogue and character actions. This convention is prevalent in "The Things They Wore", as.”.