One attribute of O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "verisimilitude", his work contains details of the events he encountered. His conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to blurring the distinction between fact and fiction is a unique aspect of his style. In the story "Good Form" in "The Things They Carried", O'Brien discusses the distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." He suggests that story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in "The Things They Carried" seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories. For example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes", which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictional.