I am extremely happy that in last Thursday’s class we talked about how it doesn’t always matter if something is “true” or not. Rather, we are supposed to look into a story to see what the author wants us to take from it. After finishing the story, I went online to try and find any quotes from O’Brien, where I found one that said exactly what I was trying to convey in this blog entry. Here it is:
"My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. … Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. …” - Tim O'Brien (http://www.shepherd.edu/englweb/362/WebQuestOBrien.htm)
In The Things They Carried, storytelling wasn’t just a way for O’Brien to tell the audience his past, but was a means of survival. They were how he was able to cope and handle the grief that came with the hard-to-handle experiences of the war and life in general. Everyone that was an important part of O’Brian’s life is now dead as he writes the novel twenty years after the war. It is important to keep this in mind when we read all the stories about Kiowa, Cross, Linda, and all the others, because those are the only people that he had to console in, and by putting them into stories, they are given an enduring fame – they cannot die because their stories will always be alive to readers.
Take, for example, the story of Linda – O’Brien’s childhood sweetheart and true love. From the first chapter of this story, Linda is the fantasy that Tim wants while at war. He is constantly thinking about her, how he wished he was with her, how she was his true love. Yet, it isn’t until the last chapter of the story that readers are made aware that the last time Tim saw Linda was when they were nine years old.
I don’t know about everyone, but had this chapter not been inserted, I would have finished the book thinking that Linda was a woman at home married to another man. But this is exactly what O’Brien wants to do with Linda and all the other characters. Even though she died of a brain tumor, he chose to invent a story that kept her alive – both on paper and in his mind.
And it isn’t just the characters that he is attempting to keep alive. I think that through his storytelling O’Brien is also attempting to keep himself alive – giving himself something to live for after the war. Had he not found this knack, he very well could have ended up like Norman Bowker at the end of chapter 13, who committed suicide shortly after returning home because of his isolation.
In the end, I don’t feel like this story has nothing to do with talking about Vietnam, thus stressing that it doesn’t matter if the stories are true or not. Rather than preserving the events that happened in the war by truthful accounts, O’Brien wanted to put together a bunch of stories whose purpose were to immortalize the lives of his close friends.
While I applaud the first sentence of your post, I'm a little disconcerted by the second. I'm not sure we are looking for what O'Brien wants us to take from his text; rather, we find what we determine is significant/meaningful enough to throw into focus. Whether this coincides with O'Brien's intentions... do we care? Or, does the text itself betray a kind of possessiveness on the part of O'Brien, in that the glimpses of storytelling methodology that he provides in the novel reveal a need for O'Brien to maintain control of a story that (perhaps) always threatens to break out of his control? Is the navigation of such tension that which keeps him alive, as you say?
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said about how O'Brien coped with story telling. He mentions in the book about how his daughter asked him why he was so obsessed with writing war stories. He doesn't really have an answer for her. I think he just needs to express everything he was feeling. The linda story was completely false, yet we as readers want to believe it, and we do just so we can feel what O'Brien is feeling. No one really can understand, but his falsehoods are his way of telling us.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your final point, it doesn't matter really if the stories are true or not. They are personal and they are war stories, which we have been warned are never true.