SOURCE: Wesley, Marilyn. “Truth and Fiction in Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried.” College Literature 29, no. 2 (spring 2002): 1-18.

In the following essay, Wesley contrasts O'Brien's representation of the truth in If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried.

The requirement of truth as a faithful portrayal of unique experience is the standard most consistently applied to the literature of the Vietnam War. In his discussion of memoirs of the war, J. T. Hansen observes that all the writers he studied shared the objective of “authenticity,” an authority based on “knowledge of the war they experienced” (1990, 134-35). Similarly, Donald Ringnalda points out that for the former soldiers, who are the most exacting audience for the Vietnam story, the standard of evaluation is “accuracy, factualness, faithful attention to details” (1990, 65). Nevertheless, as Lorrie Smith argues, verisimilitude has “no inherent...