The Things They Carried- The Purpose of a Story

       In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Jim Cross, the narrator, tells many stories about the war and the lasting impacts of its memories. Through these carefully crafted representations, Cross manages to blur the line between what is fiction and what is reality. At the end of “Spin,” Cross illuminates what he believes the purpose of a story is, “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for the eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story,” (O’Brien 36). The point that he hopes to portray is that stories are simply reflective of what a human recalls, or at least what they want to remember. As life goes on, certain distinctive details may diminish, but what is left is the truth that wants to be told.