Verses of Reality in The Things They Carried by O'Brien"The difference between fairy tales and war stories is that fairy tales begin with 'There was once,' while war stories begin with 'Shit, I was there!'" (Lomperis 41). How do you tell a good war story? Is it important to be accurate about the events that happened? Should the reader trust the narrator? In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien examines what it takes to tell a good war story. He uses his experiences in Vietnam along with his imagination to weave a series of short stories into a novel. First, the reader must understand what makes a good "war story." The protagonist of the novel, Tim O'Brien, gives us his interpretation in the chapter "How to tell a true war story". A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of appropriate human behavior, nor prevent men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, don't believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel relieved, or if you feel that some small piece of righteousness has been saved from a greater waste, then you have become the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no righteousness. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, then, a true war story can be told through its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil (O'Brien 68-69). With this concept, we can evaluate and attribute value to the stories presented in The Things They Carried. Yet, it's still not that simple. The reader is continually challenged to ask what is real and what is imagined. The evaluation of each narrator is constant. While the protagonist continues to remind the......middle of paper......it doesn't matter if they are true stories (Lomperis 54).Works CitedBonn, Maria S. "Can Stories Save Us? Tim O' Brien and the effectiveness of the text (The Vietnam War)." CRITICISM: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36.1 (Fall 1994); 2-16.Calloway, Catherine. “How to Tell a True War Story: Metafiction in 'The Things They Carried'.” CRITICISM: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36.4 (Summer 1995); 249-258. Kaplan, Steven. “The Narrator's Eternal Uncertainty in Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'.” CRITICISM: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35.1 (Fall 1993); 43-53.Lomperis, Timothy J. "Reading the Wind" The Literature of the Vietnam War. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. Neilson, Jim. Fictions at War: American Literary Culture and Vietnam War Fiction. Jackson: Mississippi UP, 1998O'Brien, Tim. The things they carried. New York: Broadway, 1990.