This novel isn’t about truths or fabrications. It’s about feelings. Tim O’Brien tells us that the soldiers “carried their sadness” and earlier “They carried their stories” (O’Brien 10). It doesn’t matter if O’Brien actually killed the “slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty” who laid in the red clay trial outside the village of My Khe (O’Brien 130). What matters is that he felt as if he did. “I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presents made me guilty enough” (O’Brien 179). We, in our daily lives, usually don’t think about things like this, but what makes something true? Is it the empirical evidence or the feelings? O’Brien seems to think it’s the lasting impression we’re left with “a true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe”, and I agree (O’Brien 78). Would O’Brien have felt any more pity and remorse if he had actually killed the man outside of My Khe? If he experienced the emotions accompanying killing a man, it doesn’t matter if he actually threw the grenade, or if he was even there as we're led to question.
By exaggerating their deeds and giving us conversations that never happened, O’Brien allows us to see and feel for his comrades in the Alpha Company in a way that we would never have been able to if we were presented with the straight facts. By telling stories, O’Brien has not only immortalized his friends, allowing him to deal with the pain of their loss, but he has given us a clearer portrait of their characters. Who cares if Curt Lemon never painted himself up like a ghost and goes trick-or-treating naked? Even if it never happened, we know exactly what kind of guy Lemon was and we have very human feelings to relate to him.
This is what he means by “[T]hat’s a true story that never happened” (O’Brien 84). It made you feel something, something that the author felt, and felt strongly enough to put to paper and to other people. This is why he dedicates an entire thirty page chapter to “How to Tell a True War Story”. What the novel boils down to is this: author Tim O’Brien is carrying heavy emotions—sadness for the way Vietnam changed him and took his friends—character Tim O’Brien is able to react to all these real and imaginary situations the way author Tim O’Brien wished he could have. “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and god. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (O’Brien 180). Thus, allowing author Tim O’Brien to feel and through those feelings, experience the stories. He wants the experience and he wants the reader to feel it as well and all that feeling makes it very, very real.
I would definitely have to agree with your blog in the sense that you are talking about how this book is about feelings more than actual truths. In a way, I feel like O'Brien, the author, was only using these war stories as a way to get us to feel, to remember, to "save us" (O'Brien 225).
ReplyDeleteLike you said in your blog, we would not necessarily throw ourselves into the kind of mindset that this book forces us to see on a daily basis. It makes the reader look beyond their direct lives and puts them into situations that will challenge them to their core, making them feel as uncomfortable and upset as those soldiers did. Also, as much as O'Brien claims that, "I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don't" (O'Brien 158). I feel that this entire book is just that, a way of coping with feelings and past events that he has not necessarily come to peace with yet.
The fact is, no matter if the stories he is telling us are true or not, they make us feel and wasn't that the whole point of the novel anyway? O'Brien writes, "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (O'Brien 179). Because in the end, the reader can definitely say that they feel as if they have carried something. Whether that something is an emotion, a moral, or the physical book itself, that is one truth that we know for sure.
Interesting that you take the view of determining truth by evidence or feeling, thereby eliding the debate of truth vs. fiction. Perhaps that is a good way to approach these texts: take at face value the information they present, and then determine its effect? Of course, it was equally interesting then that you went on to state outright that "what the novel boils down to is this." Is such a "boiled down" statement possible with a novel devoted to feeling? To, perhaps, attempting to uncover some strains of humanity amongst the ruins of war?
ReplyDelete(Please note distinction b/w "presents" and presence," as you use the former in a quote above when it should be the latter.)
I completely agree with your blog. This story hit me harder than a lot of novels do, and its not because it was about the Vietnam War. I found more truth in this novel than I have from any other fictional writing. Even though some of the stories about the characters may not be true, I agree with you when you say we understand characters such as Lemon without having true historical facts. These were people that, whether they truly excised or not, really LIVED in this novel.
ReplyDelete"We kept the dead alive with stories" (O'Brien 239). I don't take this as a reference to just those who "died" in the novel. I think this refers to all the characters who may have never existed in the first place. Tim O'Brien brings life to this novel. These characters had personalities, stories, and characteristics that were so believable. O'Brien took what was "dead" and gave it life.
"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head" (O'Brien 230).
O'Brien the author beautifully used his memory, imgination, and language to create beautiful spirits, ones that lived strongly in my head.