I’m not afraid to admit it: I have
an exaggeration problem. I’m known among
my friends and family as “The Exaggerator.” Well, they don’t actually call me
that (that’s a bit of an exaggeration).
But everyone I’m close with knows that I tend to stretch the truth
somewhat. So when I began “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” I immediately identified
with Rat Kiley.
“It wasn’t a question of
deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to
heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he
felt (89).” Never has a statement
better described my obsession with lying.
Too often when stories are told around the dinner table or in a circle
of friends do you hear, “You had to be there…” Rather than justifying my bland
story, I try to make it more exciting, so that other people can feel how I
felt. But for the most part, this requires
a few lies here or there: doubling the number of plates I dropped, the hours I
spent on a certain task, or the size of the crowd watching me. My audience will feel my humiliation, my
frustration, my nerves, just the way I felt them.
This relates back to “How to Tell a
True War Story.” O’Brien’s stories might
not all be true, but to me, the hard facts don’t really matter. When I read his stories, I feel the fear, the
loneliness, and the hopelessness of a soldier.
I understand through his little fibs the basic emotions of war, and that
is more genuine than any “factual” retelling ever could provide.
I think that what O'Brien does is more than just exaggeration. It's not that the details are embellished, many are just made up. The effect of making the reader (or listener) feel the feelings of the story is the same with both exaggeration and flat-out fact-invention.
ReplyDeleteI do that all the time too! I think what O'Brien realizes is that truth is a personal thing and for someone to have someone understand their exact truth the facts may not be the best mode of relation. Emotion is a hard thing to pin down and often it goes beyond the facts.
ReplyDelete