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The Things They Carried Essay

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The Things They Carried Essay
What do you carry? Your honor, your love, your sudoku book, or a packet of cigarette? They carry all of them at Tim O’Brien’s masterpiece, “The Things They Carried”. By the way what does Tim O’Brien carry? He carries different writing and storytelling techniques. For Tim O’Brien or for a reader of “The Things They Carried”, the war includes a lots of different personalities, memories and lives such as Kiowa, Jimmy Cross, Ted Lavender… In a word, the war includes “variety” and it is complicated. This different personalities and sophistication of war has caused to O’Brien used different storytelling and structural techniques . Tim O’Brien makes an invisible bridge between readers and stories by using different type of story telling techniques like “story-truth” or making complicated sentences… This book is not about what happened at war, this book is about what is telling us about war.

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we're here."
-Sue Monk Kidd

War absolutely …show more content…
Again same quote, Tim O’Brien said, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it… ” (TTTC, 65). The last sentence of quote contradicts with most parts of book. O’Brien doesn’t abstain from includes his own emotions to stories. This puts a question mark in the minds. Are the all stories true? In modern literature, it is called “postmodern” however Tim O’Brien chose to use the “story-truth” and not the “happening truth”. During the reading, this sophisticated technique for readers brings to minds that this complicated war is still happening and this technique becomes an alerter for readers. “The Things They Carried” is not about what happened in war, it is about what Tim O’Brien is telling
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