The Power of Storytelling

In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien expounds the power of storytelling through the series of stories of the characters revolving around their experiences with the Vietnam War.  To him, stories are meant to link the past to the present, and he does this with great efficiency with his characters while simultaneously demonstrating his view on the purpose of storytelling through the character O'Brien.  O'Brien uses the novel to demonstrate the power of storytelling by evoking the emotions of history instead of factual information.

One thing O'Brien seems to repeatedly do in his novel is creating an ambiguity between the fact and fiction.  To start off, he names the narrator after himself and all other character after men that he knew from his history in the Vietnam War.  However, the novel itself is a fiction, forcing us as readers to wonder about the truth in the stories.  A point that O'Brien tries to make with this is that the truth does not actually matter.  In O'Brien's view, the purpose of a story is not to relay historical information as factually accurate as possible, but to incite the emotion of the past and bring them to the present.  A message O'Brien tries to send to us is that war is unlike anything else.  The truth of war, when presented to an audience unfamiliar with its reality, is impossible to understand and while the facts might be understood, the emotions that war invokes in the soldiers can never be realized.  In this sense, the truth gets in the way of the reality.  With this novel, O'Brien prioritizes the effects the war has on the soldiers instead of the details of the war itself.

In doing this, O'Brien puts great weight in the power of the story.  To him, a story allows an audience to experience the past in a most visceral way as it is not the events of the past, but the raw emotions that is experienced.  He strives to portray the stark reality of war.  He avoids talks of honor, and valor because those things do not belong in war.  Honor and valor are instruments of the reality back home and are worthless in the world that was Vietnam.  In war, men are not driven by heroic ideals, but rather the fear of shame.  O'Brien portrays that soldiers kill and die because they are simply too afraid to not.  They are afraid of being seen as if they aren't willing to kill and die, as it is shameful and embarrassing.  In war, the idea of bravery and cowardice seem to reverse.  Also in the same vein, O'Brien strikes down the the idea that war is constant chaos of destruction and death, with never-ending battles and danger.  In reality, war is not just the adrenaline rushes of combat.  War is also the boring weeks of nothing but walking through the wet jungles of Vietnam.  War is also the tedium that sometimes proves to be too much to handle, resulting in games of catch with  grenades.  War changes its victims in a way that is impossible for someone outside of it to fully comprehend.