SOURCE: "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried," in Critique, Vol. XXXV, No. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 43-52.

Below, Kaplan examines the emphasis on ambiguity behind O'Brien's narrative technique in The Things They Carried, noting the relation between "real truth" and uncertainty.

Before the United States became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam, it had to, as one historian recently put it, "invent" the country and the political issues at stake there. The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and frightening story tellers. First the United States decided what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression for Vietnam, according to American standards; then it traveled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make its own notions about these things clear to the...