The further we progress into Tim O'Brien's collection, The Things They Carried, the more it seems that O'Brien is purposefully blurring the lines between the semi-fictional "truths" in the book and the reality of the events. Even though it appears that most (if not all) of the stories in the book are based on the actual experiences of O'Brien and Alpha Company, the reality he presents in the stories doesn't always reflect the facts of the their experiences. It seems to me that he does this as a way to get us (the readers) thinking about what actually matters in the stories, what we are supposed to pay attention to and what we are supposed to come away with.
In "How to Tell a True War Story," O'Brien says that a true war story has no moral, that there is no "lesson" that one shold take from a true war story. This really fits in with his presentation of the "truth" because in neing unusure whether or not the events O'Brien describes actually happened, the only thing that the reader can take from the stories are the feelings and emotions taht were conveyed rather than the actual facts. By keeping from us the reality of the stories, he is telling a "true war story." There are no morals or lessons to draw from the events themselves since there is always a possibility that O'Brien made them all up. However the factuality of the events doesn't change the experiences and sensory details that O'Brien is trying to convey.
One good example of this is in the story "The Ghost Soldiers," when O'Brien is describing the conditions in which the events of the story are taking place. He says "you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you're about to die" None of that is factual detail from the story, but it does just as good of a job conveying the feelings that O'Brien wants us to experience.
In the end I think Tim O'Brien just doesn't want us to get hung up on the details of his story, like he described in "How to Tell a True War Story," in the bit about the woman that always comes up to him afterwards to comment on a particular detail that really made the story for her. Even though those seens are there to evoke emotions, O'Brien doesn't want readers to take the facts of the scenes at face value, that would be missing the point, he simply wants us to understand the experiences and the feelings of the stories.
I really like your observation about how O'Brien wants us to think about what really matters, and that's why he switches up the factuality so often. I think that this is particularly shown, as you mentioned, by the old ladies. They think the story was about the buffalo, and about the war, when in fact, if they had put away the events and looked at the story, they would've seen that it was really a love story.
ReplyDeleteI also really like observation you make about O'Brien being truthful in his stories. I believe that you are correct when you say that he makes up details to point you in the direction of what is important. You made a really good observation when you said that this might be a way of O'Brien inserting a moral into the story. It was really interesting to hear about this from a different point of view. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI agree that a war story is less about teaching facts about war or lessons from was but rather conveying the emotions of the soldiers in an experience for the reader. In my mind whether each little detail is true or not really is not too important but the main emphasis lies on the effective expression of the soldiers perspective and perception of the war.
ReplyDeleteThere's an unavoidable irony in the fact that the only reason we're even thinking about these questions is because O'Brien chooses to make these issues an explicit part of his book. He's laying bare the creative process that all writers go through, making explicit the ways he's trying to avoid the pitfalls of more traditional "war stories" to get at something that more fully represents his experience--his experience as a solider but also as a writer. The two are interconnected; O'Brien was a soldier, now he's a writer (as he says throughout the book), and he (seemingly) always writes about his experience as a solider. He wants to write "truth," but "fiction" is his genre. Thus the book becomes a fascinating illustration of how fiction can get at truth.
ReplyDeleteBut all writers presumably grapple with these kinds of issues on some level. When we read "Soldier's Home" by Hemingway, are we worried about whether Hemingway "is" Krebs? Does the fact that Krebs comes home to Kansas City, while Hemingway's family was in Oak Park IL (I think) when he returned from the war, mean that the story does *not* get at some vital truths about the alienating experience of a returning soldier? The "truth" in that story has less to do with the "actual" Krebs and more to do with the emotional truths reflected in things like his observations about how the town seems both unchanged and totally foreign, as if it's moved on without him. The sense that efforts to explain are futile, that his well-meaning mother couldn't possibly grasp what he's been through. We might only worry about "facts" if there were a subsequent story where "Ernest Hemingway" wrung his hands about how he "made up" Krebs.