Until World War I, "descriptions of war in America were limited primarily to the accounts of generals." . . leaving much of the confusion and chaos of war to the imagination” (Smith 11). American writers rarely considered war as a viable literary subject, until Stephen Crane's Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage. Although Crane was never in a war zone, his publication is considered one of the first to capture the potential of the battlefield as a literary backdrop. Further developing the genre of the war novel, Ernest Hemingway added what Smith describes as a "journalistic style" to a more modern skeptical view of war. Just as Hemingway's work provides graphic details of World War I, Tim O'Brien's novels "[have] become the standard Vietnamese literature." . . [in] contemporary war fiction” (Smith 12). Like Hemingway1, O'Brien takes a journalistic approach to his novels. Narrating with his typical fragmented stream-of-consciousness method, Tim O'Brien recalls his past experiences as a soldier and creates a meta-fiction that illustrates the Vietnam War as a senseless paradox. Merging physical incident and creative writing, O'Brien poses his novel in the form of meta-fiction. Disparity is the primary tool O'Brien uses to develop his conclusions about the immense contradictions of the Vietnam War.2 For the purposes of this literary analysis, the term meta-fiction refers to the mixture of factual events and fictional details . As Patricia Waugh defines it, meta-fiction is “fictional writing which, consciously…. . . draws attention to its status as [fiction] in order to [examine] the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh 2). In this way, meta-fiction allows an author to explore a particular event from the middle of paper...... Catherine. ““How to Tell a Real War Story”: Meta-Fiction in The Things TheyCarried. » Review: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36.4 (1995): 249-257. MLASBibliography international. EBSCO. Internet. October 5, 2009. Herzog, Tobey. Tim O'Brien. New York: Twayne, 1997. Print Levin, Harry. “Observations on the Style of Ernest Hemingway.” The Kenyone Review13.4 (1951):581-609. Jstor. Internet. October 22, 2009.Moore, Julie. “Tim O’Brien’s blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy.” Arts & Entertainment (2007): 4. Related content. Internet. October 10, 2009. O'Brien, Tim. The things they carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print. Smith, Patrick. Tim O'Brien, a fellow critic. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. Print. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: the theory and practice of self-aware fiction. New York: Routledge, 1984. Print.