Many people who want to hear a story, want to hear the truth, if the truth was told in each story every story would be boring and not worth telling. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien have a similar style of expressing their exaggerated war stories with the contex making things up, they also are similar in a thematic way as Slaughterhouse Five and The Things they Carried both show that one may exaggerate a story to emphasize how important the impact was.
In Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut the main character Billy, jumps back and forth through the time he was in the war. The Tralfamadorians are made up aliens that only Billy can see after he went through a plane crash and now that he is back from the war. We notice throughout the book that Billy develops PTSD and whatever story he tells is a flashback that he received …show more content…
When it comes to telling a true story, he exaggerate the details for reader to understand the grief and emotions he went through. Because if he just explained “I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.” One wouldn’t understand what emotions he was going through, because it's an empty void of grief of not knowing who he killed. By saying the story truth, “He was slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.” the reader can vividly see the author’s description of that moment. Feeling grief for the dead man lying on the ground. That’s why when anyone listens to a war story, they feel grief, pain, even remorse without even thinking if that actually