Storytelling In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

For thousands of years, stories have been told. Either by word of mouth, or through books and movies. The Things They Carried has a recurring theme of storytelling. It appears in the book in more places than one. And each one of the appearances seems to say something different about how stories are told, or how they should be told.

In the chapter ¨How To Tell A True War Story¨ for example, the narrator is talking about how a war story should be told and what it should consist of. He says on page 67 ¨IN any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.¨ Which means that sometimes people don't necessarily tell stories EXACTLY how they happened. Sometimes there are a few details added in here or there that either make the story a little more interesting, or water it down a little.
¨Rat¨ Kiley is telling the guys a story about a guy in his old unit, Mark Fossie, that sent a letter to his girlfriend and had her come out to the jungle with him. The story starts off kind of plausible, right up until Rat tries to tell everyone that the girlfriend, Mary Anne, ended up becoming a green beret and went out on missions with no weapon. ¨Ambush. All night long, man, Mary Anne's out on fuckin’ambush.¨ And she eventually ended up going off into the jungle and never came back. This is an instance where a story may have been embellished in order to make people more interested. Or even possibly just to lighten the mood with an amusing story that nobody but Rat