The Things They Carried was full of war stories, each one telling a telling a different kind of truth. The author Tim O’Brien refers to two different kinds of truth. The first he calls the story-truth. He says “I want you to know why the story-truth is truer sometimes than the happening-truth.” (Pg.179) Telling the happening-truth sometimes doesn’t get the point across. The story-truth puts different images into you head that are made up to make you feel exactly what that person was going through. Telling the happening-truth is just going through the motions and most of the time just telling the actual story doesn’t make you understand what that person was feeling at that moment. The story-truth will make up details that never happened to make you appreciate the situation they were in.
The story about Mary Anne Bell was a perfect story-truth example. The author tells the story of a woman going to Vietnam to be their with her boyfriend and she winds up turning into a killer working with the special operations group called the green berets. What was so hard to believe about this story was that it was a woman. Had it been a man the story would have been totally believable and n
believe in the points that he was trying to make. The author wanted the reader to get a better sense of reality. He used a fantasy story to get his view of reality across. Using the story about Mary Anne Bell allowed him to get across the point of the transformation of the men that fought in Vietnam and much like Mary Anne were consumed by the jungle.
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