It was necessary and crucial to for The Things They Carried to be written anachronistically and in short story form to convey the messages and themes of the novel. Tim O’Brien would not have succeeded in communicating his points to the reader if the novel was written as one long chronological story. There are three main themes that emerge from The Things They Carried; story truth vs. happening truth, the fact that one can …showed first 75 words of 826 total…

…showed last 75 words of 826 total…not written in chronological order, O’Brien was able to vacillate between the death of Linda early in his life and the deaths at Vietnam. If O’Brien had written the novel as a typical fiction story, the themes he wanted to communicate to the reader would not have been as obvious and as easy to figure out. It was crucial that O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried anachronistically and in short story form.