Necessary Format of The Things They Carried
It was necessary and crucial to for The Things They Carried to be written anachronistically and in short story form to convey the messages and themes of the novel. Tim O'Brien would not have succeeded in communicating his points to the reader if the novel was written as one long chronological story. There are three main themes that emerge from The Things They Carried; story truth vs. happening truth, the fact that one can make deceased people come alive through stories, and that the war corrupted people and made them lose their innocence. The Things They Carried is a collection of related short stories about the Vietnam War. One of the themes that permeates the book is the theme of story truth vs. happening truth. O'Brien believes that in order to make the reader feel what was going on in the war, or the happening truth, it is necessary to create a story and exaggerate a little. These stories are called the story-truths. Throughout the novel, O'Brien interjects and explicitly tells the reader that the story he is telling is not completely true, rather, it's a story truth. In the chapter entitled Good Form, O'Brien states that "almost everything" he writes is invented. Earlier in the novel, in the chapter entitled How
to Tell a True War Story, O'Brien also implies that his stories are not true. The short story format allows O'Brien to interject and tell the reader not to believe what he is saying. However, if the book were written chronologically and in the form of one long story, O'Brien would have had to awkwardly insert passages about story truth vs. happening truth in the middle of the story. Those passages would have seemed out of place because the story would have had a certain flow to it. However, by writing anachronistically and in using short stories, O'Brien allows himself to insert chapters about story truth vs. happening truth without disrupting the "flow" of the book- because there is no real order to the novel. Similarly, the theme that war corrupted people would not have been so striking if the novel had been written in a different format. O'Brien plainly showed the truth of how war corrupted people in the chapter entitled Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong. In that chapter, the reader is introduced to a character named Mary Anne who changes from a carefree, innocent teenager into a woman who loves going out on all-night ambushes. The short length of the story allows the reader to focus on its tragic end. Other stories, s
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Approximate Word count = 834
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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