![]() ![]() Except a few details regarding the author’s own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.” O’Brien then follows that statement with “This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.” An author will more than likely make the dedication out to real individuals whether it be friends, family, or spouses- especially when the author includes “lovingly” in it however, O’Brien states his dedication and then the reader finds out in the first few pages of the first story that those mentioned in the dedication are all characters. Readers can then question how real the characters and stories are, making the likely frustrated reader as this question: why play with truth and fiction and what does O’Brien accomplish through their manipulation?įrom the beginning of the book O’Brien mixes fact and fiction, evident in the dedication and flyleaf of the book when O’Brien claims, “This is a work of fiction. O’Brien’s style of writing in this collection of short stories is shown through the relatively constant presence of “facts” that are then followed up with statements that bring those “facts” into question. ![]() The manipulation of truth and fiction in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” exists in both the stories told and the characters that are described in each and is used purposely, evoking feelings of confusion and anger from the reader, but also attachment the reader wants to figure out why O’Brien chooses to blur the line of truth and decipher what is really true and what is not. ![]() In Steven Kaplan’s essay “The Things They Carried” published in Columbia: University of South Carolina Press he says, “Almost all Vietnam War writing–fiction and nonfiction–makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain” (Kaplan 169). ![]()
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