The Things They Carried

2 Pages 624 Words

Spilling Your Heart Through a Pen
Tim O’Brien utilizes the autobiographical fallacy to vent a guilty war clogged conscience. Since the author is linked to the narrator, the reader must question the factual truths of The Things The Carried. The book is dedicated to Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa. However, O’Brien states that all the accounts, besides the narrator being a 43-year-old veteran, are fictional. So, the speaker is the author, but his stories cannot be believed as truth. Even though the stories of the narrator’s friends are fiction, the narrator stresses that the realism of these characters is not important. Tim O’Brien is linking himself to the narrator not for the purpose of making the stories more believable. According to the writer, “Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” (179) When a person reads the truer fictional stories, while believing the author is the narrator, it makes one “…feel what [the narrator] felt.” (179) Tim O’Brien is using the autobiographical fallacy to vent his negative memories in the hope that the reader can relate or sympathize.
The narrator strongly opposes the Vietnam War. Internal conflict arises when the draft picks the Tim to fight in the war. He travels toward Canada to avoid Vietnam, but feels “…ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.” (52) The reader knows that this particular story is not factual, because the narrator is tormented by images of people from the past and future (i.e. Abe Lincoln and Huck Finn). Many details of the narrator’s trip to Canada are bogus. The narrator goes to the war, survives, and states that, “…it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” (61) These words, coupled with Tim O’Brien’s linkage to the narrator, force the reader to understand the author’s guilty conscience.
The narrator relays many stories in w...