what ultimately is the power of storytelling?

Clearly O'Brien wants readers to wrestle with the distinctions between fact and fiction. What matters for him, as he explained at a conference on the literature of the Vietnam War, is the "power of stories, whether they're true, or embellished, and exaggerated, or utterly made up. A good story has a power . . . that transcends the question of factuality or actuality." In the beginning of the last story in The Things They Carried, O'Brien reveals the reasons why he tells these tales: "Stories can save us." Offering a fuller explanation in an interview with Publishers Weekly, O'Brien says, "If there is a theme to the whole book it has to do with the fact that stories can save our lives."