The Wrong View

There are some stories that are usually interpreted the way they are meant to be. Then there are some that are usually read the completely the wrong way, such as the love story in The Things They Carried. Then there are the stories that most people read right while a small part of the population see some kind of horror within it. So it is for my story.
My grandmother died within the past year. It was in her sleep, so it was peaceful. In most ways, this is the best way to go that some people can ask for. Of course, I was the one who freaked out. Just an hour before, someone had checked in on her and she was sleeping. An hour later and she’s dead.

The idea that she was alive a mere hour before she died had a sense of horror for me. It wasn’t because it was terrible. It was the sense of “what if?” that I found myself associating with the moment. What happened if they had woken her up instead of letting her sleep in? Would she still be alive? Would that have been better? Or would something worse play out afterwards?
I can see the peace in the story now. It doesn’t make everything rose colored about the situation, but it is enough. But through this I can sympathize with O’Brien and his difficultly with getting the story across as a love story. While my story is the exact opposite, there is the common theme that a story is being misinterpreted from the original purpose. The person on the other side of the story is getting some completely different experience. This in itself is a double edge sword. Sometimes authors want their pieces to have the ability to adapt to their reader. But sometimes the story is meant to be seen in one light to be understood to the fullest effects. It is a restriction of how the reader can see the story, but there is a legitimate reason for that.

The love story is something that people look at as a war story mainly because the focus is on the baby buffalo that suffers in the end. It is the thing that draws away a reader’s attention. My attention was taken to the one moment that could have changed the way things played out. It then just became a matter of following through with the thoughts.

I don’t particularly enjoy the thoughts sometimes. But it is the way that I see things play out. At this point, I have accepted all that had happened. It is not so much of a horror story than a different path. However, that is after the fact. That was when we were told it was a love story.

"Interpreting the Variorum." Stanley Fish

An article I read in my philosophy of literature class, "Interpreting the Variorum" argues for the concept of interpretive communities. By this term, Fish means that there are communities that develop that interpret works based on their own cultural values and understandings. These interpretations are thus based on the individual's cultural background. As Fish argues, the skills that we use to interpret works are individually learned and developed as they are traits that are not inherently with us.
Reading The Things they Carried, I began to wonder about the connections between Fish's article and the novel. Identifying the idea of Reader-Response Theory and the strength we put into the belief that the readers hold, at least for Fish, all the power in determining the interpretation, the intentions of the author become minimal. Thus, the section where the narrator becomes angered at the "dumb cooze" for not understanding the story indicates the notion of the reader unable to understand love that comes out of war. The narrator and perhaps other soldiers would instantly see the love expressed in a heartbreaking way for Rat Kiley's friend that had just been killed. However, other upbringings and backgrounds witness the brutal nature of war and its inhuman effects. The duality of these interpretations depends on the cultural lifestyle that you have correspondingly experienced. Yet, according to Fish, the author must be prepared to understand that these interpretive communities will add interpretations that might go against his own intention in writing. In a sense, the intentions of O'Brien in writing seem to be disregarded compared with the larger truths in the writing.
One last point is the idea that certain interpretations of works are just plain wrong. A frequent idea that we pointed to in class was the concept of reading Lolita by Nabokov and instantly believing that the point of the novel was that 12 year old girls are attractive. This interpretation seems to just stray too far into error that it can be discounted based on the sheer idea that this interpretation strays so far away from any other interpretation. This example illustrates the dangers of letting the reader determine the meaning with interpretations that find no logical point. A parallel to this interpretation might be that war is fun and enjoyable after reading The Things they Carried. Authorial intent seems to find some ground to stand on when considering these blatantly false interpretations that would seem to grossly offend the original meaning of the text. However, if evidence is there and you could back up your point, the interpretation might be logical. There comes a point where infinite interpretations of a text do not seem likely and the reader would in fact include interpretations that have no backbone.

The Author's Truths and Our's

Throughout the past week we have been discussing the truth of story telling. We have recently embraced the idea that the truth in storytelling is based on the emotions created within the text. As in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, we feel as if the stories told are based on the emotions felt by O’Brien during his stay in Vietnam. This is to say that an author can convey truth solely based on the emotions he/she can create within his/her reader. In turn, this also creates a stronger connection between the happening truth and the story then creating truth based on more on the characters and situations used.

While the authors intent on creating truth is important. I think it is naïve not to look at the role the reader plays in this situation. There are times in which the reader may dive into a story that the writer intended to be fiction, and come out with something that, to them, is an inherent truth. Inevitably, there are also times in which an author’s truth is found by the reader to be a lie so far beyond the realm of possibility. This is an aspect of story telling that I think is extremely important to point out. If stories are built on a foundation of emotion, then won’t we all build different stories based on our own experiences and the emotions that we have felt through these experiences?

There are points in which the author is able to create emotions in the reader the way he intended to. I have never lost someone that is as close to me as Curt Lemon was to Rat Kiley, but I still seemed to feel the emotions he felt. O’Brien in this sense created a new emotion within me, filling the place that had never experienced a death like that. There are also points (in this book and others) that I find I am feeling emotions O’Brien never made a point to put in. This is where the reader interpretation of past experiences comes into play.

So now, for me, it has become even more confusing trying to sift between the truth the author makes within his text and the truths that we make ourselves from these texts.

And then, fiction becomes reality.

This video directly reflects on the themes of this course and especially on The Things They Carried. I suggest you watch the whole video (it is 6 minutes long)! Here is some important dialogue:

At 1:44--

The guy: "If you could have a memory of anything, real or not... what would it be?"

The girl: "A fake memory? You don't make any sense."

The guy: "I've always been good at that."

At 2:29--

The guy: "What if we had a chance to remember things that we never actually experienced?"

The girl: "What good is it if it never actually happened? No one would believe it."

The guy: "You'd believe it. It's about the feeling--that's what matters."

The girl: "The problem is... I like my stories based on reality, and you like fiction."

At 5:32--

The guy: "And then, fiction becomes reality."

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Much of the dialogue in this short film parallels both class dicussion and what we have seen in The Things They Carried.

Some of us relate more to the guy in this video: he is very abstract and does not care about the distinction between reality and fiction. As he says (much like in classroom dicussion), "It's about the feeling--that's what matters." Yet, others (such as myself) get caught up in reality, much like the girl in this video. I like my stories based on reality, and it's harder for me to care about the story or meaning if it is not true in the sense that it did not happen.

The climax of this video is the greatest connection to The Things They Carried; a fake, fiction story becomes a reality. I think this is a great characteristic of both this novel and this video. In The Things They Carried, the reader is aware that the novel is purely fictional. However, Tim O'Brien does a damn good job of trying to make this fiction become reality. He blurs so many aspects of real life to make his story extremely credible. For example, Tim O'Brien (the author) uses his own name as a character in the story; this makes the reader believe that everything that happens to Tim O'Brien (the character) happened to the author. Furthermore, Tim O'Brien uses other real people, such as his daughter Kathleen--this gives the story more and more credibility. The dedication to the novel is probably the most convincing fiction and reality blend. Tim O'Brien the author dedicated this novel to the fictional characters of his story.

Whether it is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or Wong Fu's Shell, the topics we discuss in class are motifs that each of will encounter in most storytelling. How important is reality in a story? Does it matter if you cannot tell the distinction between what happened and what did not happen?

Janking my Chain

I am annoyed by author Tim O’ Brien. It annoys me that he is a great storyteller and that I kept falling for every one of his words. Maybe there is some truth in the story, I thought and hoped. His characters were just too real, and I could see my uncle in Norman Bowker. It seemed like both of them couldn’t leave the war, spending their days in idle reminiscences, with alcohol here and there to get the memories flowing.

It is these connections that I can make between the characters and real life people that kept me believing that just maybe the book could be true. To an extent I believed that O’ Brien would know that some people would make connections like mine. His writing allows him to see inside you and just grip you, while all he does is tell you lies. The reason we choose to believe the lies can be different.

It could have been O’ Brien’s details that lure you and submerge you into the story, like the way the buffalo was decapitated as we read every word. It could have been the emotions that he displayed and we could feel, like when Kiowa drowned in shit. I personally had to reflect on my uncle’s war stories. The way he told them it wasn’t fun.

The book invests a lot of time in the characters, but we meet them as men during the war not as man fighting in it. We get the sense of danger and death but we never see the way they experience the battle. We mainly see the way they carry themselves to survive the next day. Even O’ Brien jumps in at one point to remind us that the book isn’t a war story. Although he calls it a love story, I don’t agree completely.

In my opinion the last page is where the meaning of the book is wrapped up. The book was a lesson to teach us that we can live forever. Our existence can continue in our words and in our memories. The way we choose to tell a story is the natural way because that’s the way we choose to remember it.

PS. I hate this edit thing....

Bias

It seems as though everywhere I look, I am surrounded with the view that all things natural are moral, virtuous and pure. This high-profile “green” movement has spread across the globe, in the effort to preserve nature and our environment. I often read in books about objects of nature that are meant to symbolize pure and wholesome features. While everywhere I look I seem to come across some message telling me how I should protect nature, I have come to realize that nature is actually a quite dichotomous element. It is deceiving for nature to always be used as an icon for only the good and fruitful aspects of life, when it can also be the source of great destruction and hardship.

I am writing this post in light of the natural disasters that have been devastating communities across the globe, from the wildfires in Texas, to the flooding in the northeast, to the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. So often, I see the media biased toward the belief that man is destroying nature, e.g. the media coverage of the British Petroleum oil spill, but it ignores the fact that nature often destroys man. My hometown was hit hard by two colliding tropical storms last month and saw great amounts of flooding as a result. The area was declared a federal disaster area. Five people died from their basements collapsing in on them from the weight of the water. Countless houses were wrecked; parts of homes were completely collapsed. After enduring three feet of water, my middle school has to be completely rebuilt, because it is now structurally unsound. Businesses were forced to close, unable to afford reconstruction after the flood damages. All this sadness, all from a flood, all from… too much rain?

Nature has this connotation of being wholesome and beneficial. (Indeed, while I was writing this blog, Microsoft Word listed one of the synonyms of “wholesome” to be “natural.”) But is this connotation really deserved? I am learning more and more from this class to challenge the “givens” in everyday life and analyze them to determine if they really are as simple as they appear to be. The floods that devastated my community have made me see that people have a biased view toward nature. While we should recognize nature for all of its virtuous attributes, we also must not forget the danger and power of nature, an important feature that often gets lost in the midst of all its glorification.

Linda

Every story in The Things They Carried is related to the Vietnam War in some manner except for the last one. Why would O’Brien choose to end a novel about the Vietnam War with a story about a little girl dying of cancer? I think O’Brien ends this way because he wants to make it clear to the readers that this book “wasn’t a war story. It was a love story” (p. 81).

Though a lot of the stories in this book are sad, the story about Linda is the only one that nearly made me tear up. I believe it had that effect because Linda was only a little girl and “Timmy’s” love for her seemed so sincere. It seemed tragic and unfair that she should die so young. However by the end of the chapter, after O’Brien explained how he could bring her back with a story, I was actually somewhat happy and at peace.

Linda’s story was O’Brien’s way of relating his emotions about death, which readers may not have felt when other characters died. He treats Linda as he treats all the other characters that died in this book. After all, the dead soldiers were young boys who narrator O’Brien probably loved just as dearly. He claims that he is still in fact “Timmy,” or his childhood self, and is dealing with their deaths the way “Timmy” would. Just as he dreamed Linda back to life, he tries to keep all of “the dead alive with stories” (p. 226).

The truth of O’Brien’s story is not about the war. We cannot trust that any of the details of the novel are true, including the story about Linda. I think that the emotions I experienced when reading about Linda are what O’Brien experiences every time he dreams up a story about the dead. The truth that O’Brien is trying to communicate is that even after a loved one dies, you can keep them alive with stories, fact or fiction.

Truth VS Truth

I am extremely conflicted in my impression of this book. And I think this reflects the very nature of the stories presented in The Things They Carried. They are conflicted: true, not true, true, not true. Happening-truth, story-truth. A maelstrom of fiction and non-fiction that sometimes feels raw and poignant and sometimes feels exaggerated and fake. Throughout most of the book, I wanted to take O’Brien by the shoulders and demand to know exactly what’s true and what’s fabricated. He is a sly fox though. I doubt he would answer even if I had him chained upside down and tickled the soles of his feet for days. He addressed this in the book:

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the might in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (O’Brien 152)

This awed and aggravated me in equal amounts.

It was pure frustration yesterday as I reorganized my room and stumbled upon the Pixar movie, WALL-E. Remember when WALL-E is holding the spork and looking left to right? Does it belong with the forks or the spoons? Forks? Spoons? Fiction? Non-fiction? Darn you, O’Brien.

And that is where the conflict arose –should truth be the truth of what realistically happened? Or, should it be the truth of what it felt like to be there and witness all the blood, gore, and loss? The Things They Carried is based on enough truth to get me where it hurts and where it matters. In “the Nam,” in the jungle, there was a platoon of young men. Some of them died, some of them did not. Tim O’Brien did not, and he has tried his best to heal and memorialize; and I believe that he has done that. The beauty of this book lies not necessarily in the war stories at its center, but rather in the undulating, overlapping entanglements that are people’s lives, in the act of using storytelling as a means of bringing the many facets of fragmented memory forward into the present day. O’Brien constructed and reconstructed his own experiences in order that they convey the real truth, far beyond the “truth” of what really happened and what did not. He pieced together the fragments to form a unified, disjointed, fictional, honest whole. As O’Brien writes, “In the end a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight” (81).

Pinocchio and Truth, Lies and Literature

I was recently discussing old Disney movies with a few friends when “Pinocchio” came up. We all probably know the classic story; Pinocchio is a puppet that must prove that he is truthful and unselfish in order to become a real boy. Throughout the movie, we see him drawn into other character’s lies, and more famously, we watch his nose grow when he lies. Thinking about this movie compared to our class is very interesting; we see that sometimes the truth is clear and absolute, but most of the time, truth is hidden, waiting to be discovered.

On Pinocchio’s journey to prove that he is truthful and unselfish, others dupe him multiple times along the way. “Honest John” first convinces him that a life of fame and wealth is the only way to be happy, and then convinces him to go to Pleasure Island. Pinocchio, oblivious to the purposefully ironic name, happily believes him each time he is lied to. Watching this now, we might think, “well of course he’s being lied to, why does he keep falling for it?” But don’t we do the same thing when we read The Things They Carried? O’Brien repeatedly tells us that his stories aren’t true, yet each time we are caught believing his following stories.

Pinocchio’s journey is similar in many ways to our journey as readers. Often we begin by blindly believing everything we are told. As we continue through the story however, we learn from our mistakes, that the truth is not what it seems, and that soon we have to form our own opinions on the story. These opinions can be shaped by outside forces (as Jiminy Cricket assists Pinocchio): by the author himself, or through discussions we have about the text. At the end of the story, we seem to reach what we think is a final truth; Pinocchio’s good deeds allowed him to become a real boy, or in The Things They Carried, that the story isn’t about war, but rather about emotion and remembering. However, this truth can never feel quite complete; a sense of mystery still remains. Pinocchio has an element of magic to it that seems to reflect the magic of the written story. Even after finishing our reading and discussion of The Things They Carried, we aren’t quite sure what the truth is, and it sometimes seems like O’Brien used a bit of unseen magic in convincing us of the truth. It would be nice if there were an indicator (such as a growing nose) to tell us if a story were true, but then where would the magic of our journey through stories go?

Immortality

"You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end." -- Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Words do not hold a story captive. When you speak aloud your voice sort of dissipates into the air like breath on a snowy evening, so words on a page do seem pretty permanent by comparison. They're not, though. They only last as long as the page, as the book, as the technology that holds them. Plenty of words have been lost in time. It's alright, though, because the story exists in someplace a lot more permanent than words.

Actions do not hold a story captive. By the time you're telling the story the actions are already done anyway, the coat is already drying on the rack and the storm has passed. What actually happened doesn't really matter anymore. You can't remember it, anyway. As O'Brien says, when things happen sometimes your immediate reaction is to look away and then to look back. You've only got your eyes to go on, or the feel of your feet dragging in the snow. But the story can feel things without the action.

Facts do not hold a story captive. The dead do not have to remain dead and the living do not have to be who they say they are. The author may only know so much, but the story expands beyond that, reaching out into the night, into the heads of other people who are trudging their way through the world, or once did, a long, long time ago.

A story is free because it can be whatever it needs to be. Wherever there is a willing mind, it exists. It is the collective memory of people, or their collective imagination and reimagination where the facts grow dim and potential reaches out and quietly takes your hand. Stories can pass from person to person, sometimes with no connection except the same place or the same sky, shifting into different forms and helping different people living their different lives for centuries and centuries of storms.

It retells itself without the need for words or actions or facts. Sometimes situations repeat, or pain, or happiness, and there is the potential to reimagine what will happen next. The only thing it needs is thought, or at least for us to understand it, and that is the most beautiful connection of humankind in the world.

Of course, who knows. Maybe the story isn't even held captive by the human mind. Maybe only shades of it's paradoxical truth are piercing our brains and hearts as time goes on. Maybe the world itself tells the story, even alone in the snow where no footsteps have ever fallen, or even been imagined.

All stories are true.

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.

"Lemon Tree"- Fool's Garden

LYRICS:
I'm sitting here in the boring room
It's just another rainy Sunday afternoon
I'm wasting my time
I got nothing to do
I'm hanging around
I'm waiting for you
But nothing ever happens and I wonder

I'm driving around in my car
I'm driving too fast
I'm driving too far
I'd like to change my point of view
I feel so lonely
I'm waiting for you
But nothing ever happens and I wonder

I wonder how
I wonder why
Yesterday you told me 'bout the blue blue sky
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon-tree
I'm turning my head up and down
I'm turning turning turning turning turning around
And all that I can see is just another lemon-tree

I'm sitting here
I miss the power
I'd like to go out taking a shower
But there's a heavy cloud inside my head
I feel so tired
Put myself into bed
Well, nothing ever happens and I wonder

Isolation is not good for me
Isolation I don't want to sit on the lemon-tree

I'm steppin' around in the desert of joy
Baby anyhow I'll get another toy
And everything will happen and you wonder

I wonder how
I wonder why
Yesterday you told me 'bout the blue blue sky
And all that I can see is just another lemon-tree
I'm turning my head up and down
I'm turning turning turning turning turning around
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon-tree
And I wonder, wonder

I wonder how
I wonder why
Yesterday you told me 'bout the blue blue sky
And all that I can see, and all that I can see, and all that I can see
Is just a yellow lemon-tree

There's a comment on the youtube page that reads: "Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" brought me here."

A True Story

Throughout The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. By giving the narrator his own name, it becomes impossible to know whether or not any given event in the book actually happened to him. This confusion is heightened when his characters contradict themselves in the collection of stories, thus making the truth of any statement questionable. This intentional blending of fact and fiction demonstrates that the objective truth of a war story—in fact, make that any story—is less relevant than the actual telling of a story. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. O’Brien is not writing a history of the Vietnam War. Statements such as “This is true,” which opens “How to Tell a True War Story,” do not establish that the events recounted in the story actually occurred. Rather, they indicate that the stylistic and thematic content of the story is true to the experience of the soldiers in the war. O’Brien’s assertion that the truest part of this story is that it contains no moral underscores the idea that the purpose of stories is to relate the truth of an experience, not to manufacture false emotions in their audiences.

Since several of the stories in The Things They Carried are told from O’Brien’s point of view twenty years after the war, facts have become cloudy, and all that remains of the experience are the lingering feelings and memories. He is aware of his omissions and exaggeration of detail, and in the case of “Good Form,” he even suggests that all of his previous stories are fiction. Even if he did not actually kill a soldier in My Khe, the truth of his feelings about war is no less valid. He explains, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth (171).” Sometimes, in storytelling, factual truth is not as important as emotional truth. O’Brien himself says that his goal is to make his readers believe. His priority is not on the facts, but on our identification with his feelings. O’Brien’s characters and contentions are just as powerful and valid if the facts and logistics behind them were made up.

Storytelling, it's a joke!!

As a story teller and a joke teller myself I can see, or at least make myself believe I can see, why it is that O'Brian speaks to the reader in the way he does. Just think to yourself about every time you've told a joke more than twice or every story you seem to find yourself telling over and over again, your go to story if you will. I do not know about most of you but in my case each time I tell my joke or story it is different. It contains different details or different scenarios, I'm not saying completely different because then it would be a different story but altered just enough to keep the crowd entertained. It also has to do with the fact that when one finds themselves consistently telling stories and jokes they can never remember the whole one precisely the same as the original. The main point of the whole joke or story is not the minor detail but the climax or punch line. The reader or listener takes the most from the punch line. O'Brian tells us these false stories in order to force us into believing what he wants us to believe; we see the story in the way that he wants us to see it. The only difference between the usual story teller and O'Brian is that O'Brian tells us when he is lying rather than just telling the story and letting the reader but what he/she wants to believe. In my opinion this fact strengthens the case for the idea that all O'Brian is truly looking to do with this novel is get across his final point, all he cares about is the punch line. In fact the reason this novel may be viewed as how to tell a story rather than a war story is because he does tell us that he is not telling us the truth. If he was attempting to make this a war story he would of let us believe the details he was giving us, I mean its already enough to know the novel is fictional, why does he need to keep reminding us? It is because he is not trying to get us to believe this is a war story, the war details he writes about would be in my opinion described as the details of a joke that always seem to change, he is trying to teach us how to tell a successful story. The only thing one should take from this novel is that anyone can be a storyteller it just takes a little truth and a lot of B.S.

Norman Bowker was not a real man. He exists solely through The Things They Carried as a fictional character. If we are to take the text as solely what it gives us, there is no need to explore the author’s life and experiences: the text speaks on its own. Norman Bowker thus exists as a sad case of a man returning to a country that seemingly doesn’t want him and he doesn’t belong in. But it is impossible to consider this story without some context behind it. It is essential to understand that many returning Vietnam veterans were forced to live with these feelings.
The pursuit of Norman Bowker as a real person does not matter. Bowker represents the returning Vietnam veteran. They were confused and did not understand that the nation had hated the war and passed this hate over to the veterans.
As O’Brien reflects on the Bowker story, the narrator O’Brien states, “You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (158). Although O’Brien may have forged the details, the story itself is true. If a truth can be bolstered by a forgery, then O’Brien believes one should write on.
And thus, we have reached a paradox; the idea that truth can be strengthened by the addition of lies. O’Brien believes that the details are malleable and can be falsified in support of absolute truths. This belief puts us a bit at odds with Cat’s Cradle. Bokononists would have a field day with this one.

a query

Would The Things They Carried lose credibility if it were not written by a war veteran? What if, for example, you wrote the novel? The same novel, exactly the same, but instead of Tim O'Brien, the identified narrator/writer/editor were you?

I wonder if we aren't lending too much--or not enough--credit to lived (vs. imagined) experience.

"It's the moment of truth and the moment to lie"

I haven't listened to this song that closely, but I thought it might provide an interesting image of war in comparison to the (rather convoluted) image that O'Brien gives us.

Understanding

The narrator in this story is thinking back and remembering his time in the Vietnam War. That is the only absolute fact we can rely on, and whether or not the instances are accurate or realistic is another story within itself. O’Brien’s language is imbedded with subtleties and the way the novel is structured allows us to take a guess about how we are supposed to read it.

The first time I read through this novel, I do not think I understood what he was going for. I thought it was a well-written war story; yes, the parallelism between the narrator and the author was a bit unsettling, but I took each story at face value, not stopping to realize I was no better than the old woman who did not usually enjoy war stories. I did not see how the passage about the baby water buffalo was about love, I do not know if I even now fully understand even though I know the narrator’s intention. I think the understanding or, rather, the lack of can be based on the idea that only those who have lived through war can understand it. I think that maybe people who fought in the Vietnam War, or even the current war, would understand the emotion and meaning behind the metaphors, morality or immorality, and why things simply are accepted because it was, or is, war. There was no other option, no other way to pass the day or deal with guilt. We know that the story is fiction, and he reminds us in a later chapter, but the ideas are still present and we feel the same guilt, fear, and sadness the foot soldiers do because by reading into these stories, we are closer to understanding and then holding the burden.

And then, there is the whole idea about trying to get the story across right, and if it is even true or just modified by our memory. When you are involved in a car accident and you are asked to review exactly what happened after, scenes and clips are missing. There is no way to know exactly how one reacted or what occurred. We modify what happened based on assumptions- based on a simple picture we cannot remove from our minds. In the text the narrator informs us that these stories have been told and retold countless times and we can ask why. He even repeats the picture that he cannot remove from his head, like Kurt Lemon’s body in the trees, or the star-shaped hole. The rest, and what happened in between snapshots is up to our minds and our memories. We can continue a story even if the characters are dead because we know what they could have done, or what they would have said at a particular moment. And just because it may not have physically happened, the idea happened, the thought occurred, which keeps the memory and story of these people alive and true. The details are not what are important—it is emotional connection we make that lasts. The stories just help us ground these emotions.

"The trees are alive. the grass, the soil---everything"

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life” (O’Brien, 77)

This quote in the The Things They Carried really caught my attention. The first line of the quote still confuses me days after I have thought about what it could mean. The second part I believe is a true emotion that soldiers do have while on the battlefront. Preparing for war, although I have not experienced it, must be the biggest emotional test of one’s life. You can hold it together, or you can break. Be intimidated by the duty of putting your life on the line for the good of your country, or embrace it and fulfill that duty wholeheartedly. To the general population, going to war, especially Vietnam is way to move on from this world we live in. However, for a soldier who witnesses the death of another on the battlefield or just the pure adrenaline of literally fighting for your life, now has the ability to look back and honestly understand the value of life. This emotion is phrased perfectly by O’ Brien, “that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life”. When you return to that tent at night, and pull the sleeping back over your head, you realize the value of breath, warmth, and life. The thought keeps floating through your head, why wasn’t that me who took the bullet today?

I think we unfairly characterize veterans. Whenever veterans are discussed, it seems as if a majority of the conversations are about the memories and thoughts they have that they must cope with every day. Soldiers do not only return home with the emotional and physical burdens they carry, they return home with a stronger, more genuine appreciation for the simple things in life. Perhaps they return home stronger and more complete of a being then we are, after having been living on the edge for months at a time. This gratefulness of life is the fine print of war, the part of the experience that nobody can witness as passionately as a war veteran.

A True Story?

I believe that it is almost impossible to tell a “true” story. To tell a story in such a way that others experience the events in the story in the same way that the storyteller did, he/she must add details (that he/she may have in reality forgotten) to convey the emotions involved in the situation. It’s very difficult to remember all the details about something you did or something that happened to you and therefore storytellers must invent some of these details (often subconsciously) to convey meaning. If I were to tell a story about how I played in my tennis matches this past weekend, I know that I could not explain every point I played in full detail. But I can remember how I felt and I could tell a story about how my matches went in general. I’m sure that even though I may think that I am explaining things exactly as they happened, some details would be lost in translation and some would be created in my mind to convey how I felt at that particular moment in my match. But just because I remember details a little differently than they actually “truthfully” happened during my match, doesn’t mean my story doesn’t have validity. I don’t exactly remember the feel of the court under my feet, I don’t exactly remember the sound my sneakers made as I stretched out wide for a ball, and I don’t exactly remember the look on my opponent’s face as she hit a winner down the line, but adding in these details as I think I remember them would make for a much better, a much more engrossing story than just the cold hard facts would. If I just told you the scores, the entire emotional side of the story would be lost. In fact it wouldn’t be much of a story at all.

In “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’ Brien may have written a fictional story, but I’m sure that the emotions are real. By writing a fiction, it was probably easier for him to convey the actual experiences he and others had during the war. I can imagine that during war, the line between reality and fiction is blurry and that it is hard to remember events exactly as they occurred. But the emotions stick with you and to convey these emotions to others who learn your story, you must add in those forgotten details as you believe they happened or so that they best convey the true feelings of the events described in your story. In the beginning of “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien dedicates the novel to some of its characters. This signifies to me that, although the characters themselves may be fictional, the emotions and values they represent and the things that they experience in the novel have truth.