Throughout the whole novel The Things They Carried, the reader struggles to understand what is and what is not the truth in O'Brien's stories. By the time the reader finishes one of the last stories "Good Form", he learns that a majority of the book is made up which blew my mind. O'Brien talks throughout the entire novel about what makes a story true and how to tell a good story and then tells us that all his examples of "true" stories are not even true.

I believe that his point of this novel is not only to tell the reader about the environment of war but to illustrate what truth really is. I think that in O'Brien's view truth is whatever the story teller wants it to be. The message I got from his book is that as long as the theme and intention of a story is what the story teller wants it to be, the actual plot of the story does not matter.