The first thing I noticed about The Things They Carried was that the title page says "A work of fiction by Tim O'Brien". I thought it was a little odd, and it made me not put as much faith into the integrity of the book as I could have, but I forgot about it as I started reading. The heavy stories that Tim O'Brien shares pull at the heartstrings in many cases and evoke so many emotions.
Throughout the novel though, O'Brien keeps mentioning that certain aspects of the stories might not be (or are not) true. He keeps toying with the possibility that he made it all up. This made me wary too as I kept reading. He goes back and forth between telling the truth and "telling the truth". He plays a very meta game of telling us that he's lying, but makes us think to ourselves "is he really lying? He could be lying about lying!". He keeps saying that it is okay to fabricate certain things about a story to get the point across. But I'm not sure I really believe that in all cases.
I'm a firm believer in being respectful when it comes to topics such as war, and I just don't think that O'Brien is being very respectful at all. When I read the chapter "Good Form", I became extremely angry. I was arguing with myself over whether it was right, or even just okay for O'Brien to tell us all these things about events that he didn't actually experience first hand. But ultimately, in my mind at least, I decided that it wasn't very okay at all.
The story that got me the most was "The Man I Killed". In it, O'Brien is very raw about this man that "he killed". He tells the reader all of these unedited details about this man that he seemingly killed in the war. Then, in "Good Form", he admits that he didn't kill the man and that he was just present at the time that he was killed. He says that he was too scared to look at any of the bodies that were in Vietnam. Honestly, I thought the fact that he (basically) made up almost the entire story was awful. It just seems so disrespectful to me. A lot of thoughts ran through my mind like "what about all the people who actually had to kill people in the war? What about the people who died because they had to kill people in the war? What about the people who are scarred because they had to kill people in the war?". It just upset me because it seemed like O'Brien was looking for sympathy if he really did make all of this up. I don't want to sound disrespectful myself by saying these things or in any way take away from O'Brien's actual experience in the war, but I'm just frazzled by the whole thing.
