In Tim O'Brien's novel, “The Things They Carried,” imagination can be both beneficial and corrosive. This novel consists of the truth of history and the real truth. Throughout the novel, imagination plays an important role. Tim O'Brien wrote his book about the war based mainly on his memory of the war. He didn't remember all the details of the war, so he made up some false details in the stories to make them seem more interesting. He wants readers to be able to feel how he felt and understand how it all happened as he tells the story. He wants to provoke emotional truth. O'Brien tries to show that imagination is not entirely a bad thing and that it is also a good thing. O'Brien begins to create stories about what could have and what could not have happened during the war in addition to the original war story. With the power of imagination, O'Brien is able to talk about something he could have done but didn't in the past. Imaginations helped him escape reality. Imagination has the task of finding the real truth, attempting reconciliations and creating reality. O'Brien shows that imagination can help us do things that couldn't be done in real life. According to Tobey Herzog, "O'Brien invents a soldier-author narrator, also called Tim O'Brien, to tell stories of his life and experiences of the Vietnam War, to retell war stories told to him by other soldiers, and to comment on the art to tell…” (104). He is saying that O'Brien managed to invent another version of himself in the novel so that he could tell stories of his life and also stories of other characters' lives try to invent something that he never did before. When O'Brien was drafted into the war, he didn't want to go. Use his story character... middle of paper... even these troop characters could be made up distinguish between reality and fantasy because everything seems so real. “Good Forms” O'Brien admits that the story which he told about Bowkar was slightly different from the real story. Therefore, imagination can give us false beliefs. Overall, imagination can result in positive and negative ways. Imaginations allow us to become a completely new person. Just like Tim O'Brien he used his imagination to create himself entirely new. It gave him the power to do anything he wants, like look at dead bodies and actually be able to kill someone. O'Brien shows us the power of imagination and storytelling through his novel “The Things They Carried.”