SOURCE: Robinson, Daniel. “Getting It Right: The Short Fiction of Tim O'Brien.” Critique 40, no. 3 (spring 1999): 257-64.

In the following essay, Robinson investigates O'Brien's approach to the truth in The Things They Carried.

But it's true even if it didn't happen—

—Ken Kesey

In his introduction to Men at War, Ernest Hemingway states that a “writer's job is tell the truth. His standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his inventions […] should produce a truer account than anything factual can be” (xi). Tim O'Brien, for whose writing the Vietnam War is the informing principle, returns to this notion of truth in his short fiction.¹ His stories revolve around multiple centers of interest—at once stories in the truest sense, with a core of action and character, and also metafictional stories on the precise nature of writing war stories.

For O'Brien, like Hemingway in his introduction...