In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien traditional ideas gets turned on their head. You have monks cleaning m-16’s, lightness being juxtaposed with death and dark with a sense of serenity or calmness, a teenage girl getting pulled in and consumed by her curiosity of the war. In this book Tim O’Brien shows us how during war times everything was turned on its head and not the way things should be in today’s standards. He shows us this not only by the stories he shares but also in the way he writes and the components that make up the story. Tim O’Brien deviates from the convention style of writing by using metafiction, having the book nonlinear and by changing point of view throughout the story in order to show the on conventional-ness…show more content… He uses metafiction in his writing to question the relationship of fiction and reality/ narrator, along with the idea that stories keep the dead alive. In this book Tim O’Brien is one of the main characters, who’s a Vietnam vet recounting his war experiences but also a writer who examines the mechanics of writing stories. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story” he talks on the art of storytelling and giving us clues and an insight to the content, structure and interpretation of the book. O’Brien says “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way” (O’Brien 67). By showing us the components that make up a war story and how they are left to interpretation and that the stories contain things that really don’t occur and bend the truth to make them interesting. By saying this he makes us question whether or not the stories he is writing, have some truth to them. And is that what really happened. Drawing upon the ability of stories / fiction to preserve life after death O’Brien says “ we kept the dead alive with stories…often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together , or a way of making new bodies for the souls to…show more content… By having the story nonlinear it creates a disjointedness to the writing and makes it seem more as him recounting the memories in his head with no specific order. This relates back to the reoccurring theme of memory, how we use memory and stories as an escape or a way to cope with your past also as a way to bring back the dead. An example of the nonlinear approach is in the chapter “The man I killed” O’Brien talks about a man he has killed and describes the man being dead but not how it happened. Then the next chapter “ambush” explains the actions that lead up to the killing of the man. In the novel characters such as Curt Lemon are killed and then later introduced, or the narrator demeans what he has previously lead the reader to believe about a certain character like Norman Bowker. He continually brings back characters after he has noted their death the book is kind of written in flashback moments as he is recounting the war in his head. In typical fiction writing there is a beginning middle and end but Tim O’Brien does not use this approach he blends his book with nonlinear stories that coincide with each other and they all have themes and underlying messages that link with one
