Critic Roland Barthes observed that “Literature is the question minus the answer.” In Tim O’Brien’s masterful and haunting war fiction The Things They Carried, the author exemplifies this critique over and over as he, and by extension his readers, grapples with the complex and seemingly-incomprehensible tragedies and paradoxes of war. Through a deep and sometimes-contradictory recounting of his multilayered war stories, O’Brien attempts to convey the nature of war in a way that makes the audience question the true meaning of truth.
Tim O’Brien does not tell his story chronologically; rather, he chooses the order of each chapter as if he were reliving his memories as he was writing them down. In this manner, he nonchalantly brings up one event,…show more content… After engaging the audience with action and emotion for about half the novel, he explicitly states that the truth is that he is 43 years old, and when he was a teenager he was drafted to Vietnam as a foot soldier. Almost everything else, he admits, is fiction. This marks a turning point in how the reader views his stories, forcing them to question whether this admission of falsehood truly changes anything about how they’ve come to view war. Consequently, throughout the rest of the novel the reader must ask themselves whether each story actually happened and whether that makes the emotions they felt any less important or vivid. For example, in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Kiley tells the story of how a young girl named Mary-Anne traveled to Vietnam to keep her boyfriend company and gradually became more like Vietnam itself until she walked off into the jungle, never to be seen again. Here, both the audience and the author feel as if they lost something precious and innocent to the mysteries of Vietnam, and even if Mary-Anne never existed, this feeling of loss and fear of the unknown, perhaps, describes the atmosphere of Vietnam more than a factual story ever
