Truth In O Brien's The Things They Carried

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The Things They Carried Essay What is Truth? Truth is the accepted reality that is believed. In the the things they carried truth is expected to be complicated and hard to tell the difference from Truth and fiction. The definition of truth is “a fact or a belief that is accepted as true.” So according to the definition truth is something that is accepted. That leaves the question can we trust and believe that O’Brien is telling the truth. There is difference between truths."I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.(O’Brien,171). O'Brien enlightens us that almost everything in the in the book is fictional. He addresses that the book has two different types of truths, story-truth and happening truth.“The story seems unreal, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seems”.(O'Brien,68). O'Brien tells us that you might remember events in different ways then it really happened. This explains why not everything is necessarily true, but has the feel true aspect.…show more content…
“Norman did not experience failure of nerve that night,that part of the story is my own.” (O’Brien,154). You begin to question if anything O'Brien has told us so far is true, because Norman did not fail saving Kiowa. O'Brien tells us that the story of Norman and Kiowa was false and only his own story, meaning anything in this story we think is true could be fictional. “Norman is back in the story, where he belongs, and I don't think he would mind that his real name appears.” (O’Brien,154). This quote shows O'Brien's idea of truth, and questions if Norman was a real person or was always just a fiction character. It shows that because Norman cared about the stories and was an important character to add to address the idea of
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  • The Truth In O Brien's The Things They Carried

    745 Words  | 3 Pages

    To attempt to tell a story exactly how it occurred is practically impossible. As time passes, you tend to lose grasp of the certain details that happened in that reality. Sooner or later the truth becomes twisted whether you want it to or not. The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories from multiple points of view of members of the Alpha Company. In the novel, O’Brien attempts to be unbiased when narrating others’ lives, but reality becomes slippery when he tries to fill in the missing

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