What is the TRUTH?
We covered 2/3 of the book and sometimes I still have a problem figuring what the TRUTH really is. The Things They Carried is full of stories that are trues according to Tim O'Brien, but then you turn a page and he tells you that he actually added a lot to the story or just didn't say the whole truth. So, what do you think the TRUTH is? If you want support your answer with textual evidence.
I think that the all point of telling those stories in this way is showing that there is no absolute truth, because everything is filtered by someone's prospective. In the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story" O'Brien explains the characteristics that a true story must have, but then if you analyze his stories, they don't contain all those traits of "true war stories". At some point in the chapter he says "a true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (74) : with this I think that he is explaining that it doesn't really matter if the story you are been told is completely true or some parts are distorts, because as said before there is no absolute truth. Therefore the only important thing is what the story creates in the reader, his emotions, reactions and feelings while reading.
ReplyDeleteI want to back up Vale on this one. "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth"(171). I think this quotation perfectly gave O'Brien an excuse to manipulate us readers. The "Story-truth" might not be as exact as what he did or what he witnessed, but it does a much better job reflecting his feelings than the "happening-truth". In other words, by exaggerating/exacerbating/lying/making up parts of stories, O'Brien forces the readers to experience the heavy feelings that he experienced at Vietnam. Therefore, in O'Brien's world, truth is the feelings that people had, not necessarily exactly what happened.
ReplyDeleteWe talked about this in class today. It seems as though every time O'Brian tells us that something is true, he later tells us that it was all pretend or that most of it was made up. What I think is really true in this story is O'Brians feelings and memories about the war. He makes up stories and names in order to portray how the war was and how he felt. By doing this, the reader can really see how O'Brian is feeling. If O'Brian just told a war story, I think the reader wouldn't find it as interesting. That's why he uses fake names and fake stories to make the reader feel how he felt.
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