When I read The Things
They Carried back in high school, I truly did not appreciate the text to
the extent that I do now. The same
questions baffled me, “Is this not a biography?
When is he telling the truth? And
what the **** is a war story?” and back then, the lack of an immediate answer
made me dislike the novel. Actually, it
must have been the feeling of betrayal which truly drove my hatred. To tell stories without “happening-truth” was,
in my view, unfair. Only after I started
to tell my own stories did I appreciate O’Brien’s technique as an example of
good storytelling.
I used to be an awful storyteller, and the past couple
years, I have only gotten slightly better.
I did not understand that telling a good story was not simply reiterating
the facts, and unsurprisingly, O’Brien’s manipulation of the happening-truth
was lost on me. I changed my theory on
storytelling, because after the umpteenth time of slowly losing my listener’s
interest as their eyes start to roll over, I must be doing something wrong if I
could tragically turn a truly interesting tale into the stalest history
paragraph. For me embellishing the truth
was a way for me to keep the listener’s attention, and I realized that what
happens in my story does not matter as long as the purpose or, in O’Brien’s
words, the “story-truth” is understood.
Among the things that the soldiers carried was “the weight
of memory” (14). Timmy lists all the
things that the soldiers carried or “humped,” because he wants the readers,
through descriptions of all the physical objects they carried, to hump along
with him and share the weight of intangibles, especially memory. As seen, however, by the middle-aged woman who
does not understand that it was not a war story but a love story, the task of
conveying “story-truth” is difficult and requires repetition. This repetition of the same stories reflects
Timmy’s constant efforts of trying to find the right words. My appreciation of the novel stems from this
understanding that O’Brien the author captures the sentiments of a vet who must
cope through the use of repetition with an emphasis on storytelling.
When I first began reading the book, I was sure that all the stories were true. When I found out they were fiction, I too felt betrayed. But in the end, the fact that he lied about the tales and still kept our attentions shows that he is a good storyteller. The reader is able to forgive him for lying, and will still read his tales in order to experience the emotions he is able to convey through them.
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