They Carried

To be honest, I’m not up to speed on, The Things They Carried, but I hope to be able to get caught up by Tuesday. Now, with that being said, I’m basically just going to share my thoughts on what we’ve talked about in class and what I’ve read up to now.
Probably one of the most interesting things I’ve ever come to a realization of is what we talked about in class on Friday. I never thought about it this way before, but It is so true that sometimes, something that is not the truth, can be more true than the truth itself. When we first talked about this, I was a little upset, because I thought the idea was ridiculous, because after all, how can something that’s not true be truer than the truth? Anyway, as we went on to explore the subject, I realized that the answer to this question was that the “story” that one may be telling, can be more true than truth itself because of the emotions it can convey.
In, how to tell a true war story, the narrator says, “a true war story does not depend on that kind of truth…A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The narrator goes on to tell a “not true” story and claims it is truer than the true war story because of the emotions it conveys. In other words, probably a lot of these stories aren’t necessarily true, however they capture the truth better than the “true” story would capture it.
In summation, The Things They Carried contains the theme of “truth vs untruth, or stories” that convey to the reader more truth than one could get out of any “factual” Vietnam War history book.