In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, war stories are told that are supposed to be fictional, but the reader must question what is embellished and what could potentially be true. A true war story is difficult to find. O’Brien writes, “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (O’Brien 17). O’Brien believes that a true war story can never be told because while any situation during a war is occurring, the facts can be easily distorted. This fact ultimately makes the book fictional, despite the fact that the characters and situations are based on real people and real happenings. This is significant because the novel and other literature’s relevance, as fact or fiction, are challenged. This is especially pertinent to war novels because there is no such thing as a true war story.

The novel is said to be fiction with situations that appear to be real. Despite the novel being based on certain people and situations, the stories told help to accentuate different themes. Events, such as Ted Lavender’s death, that are meant to be fictional seem as though they are real events. The reader must remember that there is no such thing as a true war story. In The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross asks Tim O’Brien not to say anything about Ted Lavender’s death. O’Brien writes, “He hesitated for a second. ‘And do me a favor. Don’t mention anything about-’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t’” (O’Brien 30). The reader is once again confused as to whether or not the stories are fact or fiction when the story of Ted Lavender is told several times. Jimmy Cross also asks to be made out to be the good guy in the memoir, providing more evidence to proven that war stories cannot be trusted. The complicated break in continuity challenges the reader to question what is true and what is fictional.

Although it is difficult to determine fact from fiction in war novels, there is one common theme that ties many of these stories together: death. O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, is littered with death and images of death. Imagery of death is one theme that the reader can take away from the story without having to interpret the significance of the events. Death touched every character in the story. O’Brien ends the novel with a story about his childhood sweetheart, Linda. This story begins with the men looking at a dead body and a burnt village after Jimmy Cross called an air strike, killing everything in the village. O’Brien looks at the body of a dead man and says that it reminds him of his first love Linda. O’Brien writes, “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to spirits in the head” (O’Brien 230). Just as O’Brien is reminded of his childhood love that died while he is viewing death, all soldiers have their own way to deal with death. O’Brien uses this to combine many different themes that are present throughout the novel, such as the men carrying amulets and tranquilizers to numb the pain of death and the war.