Tim O’Brien’s writing in The Things They Carried has so far
evoked many thoughts in my head, centered around the importance of facts vs.
the importance of emotion/exaggeration in order to get a point across. The text
has also enticed me to think about how we define truth. “Honesty,”
“virtuousness,” and “truthfulness” have always been heavily emphasized by
everyone I know, but reading this book has made me question why occasional
exaggeration or the use of white lies is such a bad thing. In some cases, I
think it can be completely appropriate. If people want to convey their respective truths, and want to get
across their feelings and
experiences, I believe they should be allowed to. It may not be the entire
truth from a factual standpoint, or from an onlooker’s perspective, but it is that particular person’s reality, which
only they can know for sure, and which only they can properly express. In my
opinion, in order to effectively communicate with someone and understand
him/her—to ever have any shot at achieving empathy, for that matter—exaggeration
is sometimes required. How else is an
audience supposed to connect with a speaker, supposed to get inside their head
and see things through their eyes?
According
to O’Brien, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor
encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior…” (65). He is implying that true war stories
have no limits—there is no sugarcoating, because the sugarcoated version is not
the storyteller’s truth. I think that any tale, war-related or not, should
possess this quality. Why is such value placed on “fact” by its conventional
definition in our society? O’Brien demonstrates plainly and candidly that
telling the facts is not paramount when it comes to relating to others on an
emotional level.
This is precisely the message I took away from The Things They Carried. There is a widespread (mis)conception in society that something only has merit if it is objective, scientific, directly connected to our notions of a precise 'reality.' However, I think O'Brien's concept of story-truths are incredibly important in storytelling, especially because a story's goal is, arguably, not even necessarily to tell the truth – but to connect the reader and speaker on an emotional level. I think that if exaggeration, emphasis on feeling over fact, white lies, subjection, and all of the other facets of a story some so quickly point to as 'untrue' serve the purpose of not only allowing the reader to understand a story's events, but to feel them, these untruths are actually the most important parts of storytelling.
ReplyDeleteI agree that O’Brien’s ability to bend the truth actually enhances the story. Instead of readers feeling cheated from the truth, we are able to connect with the emotions of the war more effectively. As readers who did not experience the war, we need the most extreme examples of the brutality of war if we want any chance of understanding what they felt. The truth does not provide such an effective way of communicating the feelings of war, so O’Brien must enhance it.
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