Analysis Of The Novel The Things They Carried

In defining what a story is, opinions vary drastically. To one person, a story is merely a past recollection and to another it is a fictional piece of literature meant to teach or entertain its audience. Others may go so far as to argue only the truth is of importance in a story. Tim O’Brien expands on the true significance of a story in his novel The Things They Carried. He uses the scene of a real war with fictional additions to convey the message of the brutality of war, emphasizing the idea of the truth of the story being irrelevant. Similarly, in J. D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden utilizes a stream of lies without impacting the ideas of suicide and growing up found in the book. The story conveyed to the audiences of these novels is of greater gravity than the importance of truth due to the absence of an effect on the recounting of the story, a small purpose of blurring fact and fiction, and the insignificance of fact in conveying the emotions of a story. When O’Brien recounts his tales in the Vietnam War, he uses vivid descriptions to help convey the situation he intends to retell. In the novel, O’Brien reminisces a story about a man he had killed during the war. He describes the aftermath by detailing the corpse of the fallen soldier, expressing,â€Å"He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man. He had bony legs, a narrow waist, long shapely fingers.† (O’Brien 118). When describing the body, the fact ofShow MoreRelatedEssay about The Things They Carried Literary Analysis764 Words   |  4 PagesLiterary Analysis of The Things They Carried: Metafiction   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Tim O’Brien brings the characters and stories to life in The Things They Carried. He uses a writing style that brings stories to life by posing questions between the relationship of reality and fiction (Calloway 249). This is called metafiction and it exposes the truth through the literary experience. 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