Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

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In the book The things they Carried, author Tim O’Brien challenges readers to think about what “Truth” is by using a series of short made up stories to relay his experience in the Vietnam War. He chooses to use “story truth” rather then “happening-truth” because stories help the reader feel what he felt, and bring the experience to the present. The first thing Tim O’Brien used was “story truth” by that he can show the readers how he really felt, by exaggerating. By saying “story truth” rather than “happening truth” it makes the reader in his shoes, so that they can actually empathize what he was going through during the Vietnam War. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
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Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, perhaps more than any other author gives eloquent and contrary voice to American involvement in war. From his own experiences in Vietnam, O’ Brien wrote a series of anti-war theme novels, including his acclaimed 1987 short story “The Things They Carried,” considered one of the top 100 short stories of the twentieth century (e.g., John Updike and Katrina Kenison, eds., The Best American Short Stories of the Century, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999). In his…

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