A little before half way through the chapter titled how to tell a true war story, At the bottom of page 67 in my book, is where Tim O’Brian explains the difference between fact and perception during traumatic events from war. He states “its difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot” (O’Brian 67-68). Last class we got on the subject of weather or not the stories told in The Things They Carried were fictional, and I feel like this paragraph explains my opinion very well. Although Tim titles this book as a fictional novel, it can be debated that a large amount number of events and facts stated in this book are still true. So why put novel? I feel as though O’Brian did this because he realizes that his perception and memories of these war events may not be an exact match with the factual truths. This being said, I still find his stories and memories to be true, for they are exactly as he recalls and retells of them. He finishes this passage with “And then afterwards, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed (O’Brian 68).
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