How can they not be? The characters in a narrative are truly living the experiences that the author constructs. Now, perhaps that means that we have to change our idea of “truth.” The events in a story may not be real in the sense that they never happened outside of the text, but the characters in a story most certainly experienced the events being written about; otherwise there would be no story. If Jonah had never travelled to San Lorenzo, the second half of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle could not have been written. As O’Brien said in the interview mentioned in class, he wants the reader to believe that all the stories recounted in The Things They Carried actually happened to “that guy,” which I believe was in reference to a character in the novel (which one is a slightly more complicated question). Just because a novel is fiction, as a reader we cannot discount the actions and feelings of the characters in one. Even if events may be “fictitious,” the reactions to them are real. Although we cannot claim, “The water buffalo story is true! It really did happen,” we can claim that the anger and sadness that Rat Kiley suffered through from losing a friend could lead him to kill a water buffalo so violently. Because it did.
This is exactly what I was going for in my last blog post and in my one-page essay from class today. A story can be fictitious and real at the same time. There is a certain genuine sentimentality in The Things They Carried that breathes life into characters that, technically speaking, do not physically exist. They do, however, exist emotionally within the reader and his/her imagination. That is what we are left to carry. And so, they are real and true to us.
ReplyDeleteI love your idea that as readers, we can change our definition of “truth.” If we shift viewpoints to identify with the characters, the experiences that they have, or as you say, the experiences constructed for them by the author become truthful. This piece of your idea makes me think about the important connection between an author and his characters. I think that characters shape authors as much as an author would shape a character, and through this give and take process, we feel that we can trust the characters because they have such a close connection to the author. In The Things They Carried, we know that the connection between O’Brien and his characters is quite important, because he dedicates his book to them. Therefore, I would personally put the same amount of trust in his characters as I do O’Brien, although I’m not sure that that’s saying much.
ReplyDeleteAs we realize that what O’Brien the author tells us isn’t necessarily true, we are left with what the characters tell us. The characters are the ones with the experiences; O’Brien is only the mouthpiece. As Carolina says, just because what O’Brien writes didn’t happen outside the text, doesn’t discount it in terms of how the characters experience it. When we shift into the character’s reference frame, experiences and stories are true. And when we decide to surface back into reality, what we take with us is the emotions of those characters.