According to its definition, a story is an account of past events. Stories are usually fairly accurate narratives that people tell to entertain others or to help the narrator deal with past events. It is often believed that when someone doesn't tell something exactly how it happened, they are lying. This is not necessarily true. The things we remember and how we represent these memories are two completely different things. When we collect memories and tell them to others, some parts are left out and others are added. The intense feelings that resurface usually determine which parts to include and which to omit. The inclusion of some fictional parts helps fill in the gaps in the story, due to blurred memories or lack of memory in the first place. The parts that aren't mentioned are usually not important in helping the listener understand the feelings the narrator is trying to portray. But ultimately, the purpose of a story is to invite the listener into the narrator's memory and allow them to feel exactly what the narrator felt. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien uses a combination of "truth-stories" and "truths that happened" to invite the listener into his memories and feelings evoked by his memories of being a soldier in the Vietnam War. Throughout the novel, Tim O'Brien goes outside the bounds of normal storytelling. He often jumps around, changes what he has already said, switches between first- and third-person narration, and even admits to having lied in previous sections. He is not ashamed to admit the falsehood that permeates the twenty-two stories of The Things They Carried. The fabrication helps O'Brien tell the story more accurately... in the middle of the paper... death. His stories about Vietnam are directly linked to Linda's story because he tells these stories for the same reasons: to revive the dead. Tim O'Brien uses The Things They Carried to accomplish many things in a novel. Many would think that it is just a story about war, but there is much more than that packed into the pages of the book. Instead of writing a story of his experiences in the Vietnam War, O'Brien writes to invite readers to feel as he felt during the war and to come closer to reliving his experience with him. By inventing aspects of each story, he manages to make the reader feel exactly as he felt, even if he doesn't tell exactly what happened. Writing with a mix of "truth stories" and "truths" helps O'Brien tell others about his experiences, deal with the horrors of war and death, and even revive the dead..