War Stories

I think it is safe to say that O'Brien knows how to write a war story - after all, he has made a living off it.  I found it very interesting when in the text he explained how to tell a true war story. This chapter it not the only way O'brien is telling us how to write war stories - he is writing a story, which we can learn from as well.  "A true war story is never moral," O'Brien writes. "If at the end of the story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." He argues that there is no morality to war, no meaning whatsoever. When O'Brien kills a man in the book, there is no thought behind it, but he doesn't seem to feel any remorse. He just can't stop staring in awe at the reality of the body and all its gore. This implies that this novel, then, is not moral.
O'brien writes that a war story can be "true" without being "factually correct." The facts are not important and are often made up.  "Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness." Clearly what matters to O'brien in war stories is not "factual correctness."  After all, The Things They Carried is a work of fiction.  A true war story must convey what it felt like in the war, the truth of the way things were and how the soldiers felt. We don't have to believe that the events of this novel are occurred or that any of its character existed, but that does not diminish the truth of the stories. This method for telling a war story fits with this particular novel, since it is fiction, but if O'brien really believes that the "truth" of war is what is worth telling, what is to say that his non-fiction novels didn't contain some made up events?

Truth and Meaning: A Blurry Line

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a compilation of war stories, interspersed with O’Brien's – the so-called fictional writer’s – narratives reflecting on how, exactly, one tells a war story. In chapters like “How to Tell a True War Story” (65), O’Brien discusses the characteristics of a real war story: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.” Later on, in the chapter entitled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (85), Rat Kiley’s telling of the story about Mary Anne Bell is continually interrupted by his caveats and clarifications, as well as Mitchell Sanders’ interruptions to admonish Rat for telling the story ‘wrong’: leaving out the ending, including too much subjectivity among what should be the cold hard facts, and marring the ‘truth’ of the story with his commentary – to which Rat replies with his own storytelling beliefs, that his commentary would “bracket the full range of meaning.” It seems that while half of O’Brien’s novel thus far centers on narratives of war stories, the most significant discussions lie in those about storytelling itself.

One notion clearly present in The Things They Carried, then, contrasts what I considered to be one of the messages of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Both texts center on the discussion of truth in storytelling, but Vonnegut’s message, neatly summed up in the metaphor of the game of cat’s cradle itself, is clear: the reader searches and searches for meaning in a text, twisting and unraveling its strings of lies and fiction, and is left, inexorably, with an empty circle – “no damn cat, no damn cradle” (Vonnegut 166). So much of O’Brien’s novel, though, centers on the discussion of finding your own meaning in a text - a discussion usually accompanied by a debate about cold hard facts versus subjective emotion, ending in the resolution that while hard facts may tell the ‘truths’ of a story, emotion gives the reader the indescribable ‘feeling’ of actually being there to witness it. The fact that O’Brien’s notion of storytelling appears to be much more fluid, based not in hard fact but in the reader’s intuition and using their own interpretation of the narrator’s emotions to paint a picture of the event, seems to contrast Vonnegut’s ultimatum of truth and meaning – while both texts are certainly similar in their focus on truth and meaning, it seems that O’Brien illustrates the concepts as significantly more relative than we may think.

The Use of Achronological Narrative

We have spoken at length about perception and truthfulness within The Things They Carried, but there is one particular device used by Tim O'Brien (Author and character) which interests me most in this particular discussion, one which we have only glossed over. As I read, I am noticing a greater and greater emphasis on achronological narrative. This isn't simply a matter of taking individual short stories and placing them in an unusual order; O'Brien is constantly giving us references to stories he hasn't told us yet or has told us several times previously, attaching each story to others within the novel. We can see how this adds to the tangled mesh of perception and how it captures the blurred and uncertain picture of war that O'Brien (the character) is trying to pin down into words. However, the oddly structured narrative may be doing more than that. As the book as progressed thus far, O'Brien's chronological leaps have gotten more and more extreme; he jumps from the anecdote about Mary Anne Bell to the scene of a peaceful church, to the very close description and fantasy about the man he killed, then an aside concerning his life after the war. What can we make of these narrative steps? First of all, it sets up a metatextual sense of tension. We are left without a way to easily navigate from one narrative instance to the next, and so must be on guard to watch for changes in the scene, changes in description, and particularly changes in tone. The chapter “The Man I Killed” is written very differently than “Style”, or even “Speaking of Courage”. As such we must be ready to read into each section of the text more carefully, to decipher why exactly O'Brien, either as a character or an author, is writing the way he is.

Perhaps more importantly, the unique narrative also serves as a defining point of Tim O'Brien the character. As stories fade in and out, and as the tone grows or fades in intensity, we ought to follow the contours of O'Brien's memory. The chapter “The Man I Killed” contains almost no regular narrative at all, only description half-mixed with fantasy about the potential pasts of the man who O'Brien has killed. In contrast, the very next chapter is almost entirely narrative, explaining the events that led up to the previous chapter. Why would the character O'Brien choose to write in such a way? I do not know the answer myself, but the potential explanations serve as valuable insight into a character that is very rarely depicted within the narrative itself. Perhaps he has realized that he has lost control of the narrative in preference to his memories, and he is attempting to compensate. Perhaps he is trying to make the point that, for him, the raw sensation of looking at the man he has killed supersedes any explanation for it.

The Senselessness of War

            Telling a war story, as Tim O’Brien clearly elaborates for us, is quite difficult, especially when the audience has never experienced anything quite like it. Whether or not we get the full effect intended, war stories always leave us with a feeling for the utter chaos and irrationality of war. It’s curious, though, that when comparing completely different literature about war we end up with the same result.

            Look at Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, for example. A clear satire, the novel is intended to make us laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation. The Things They Carried on the other hand, relates war stories with a much more obviously weighty tone. Yes, we can giggle sometimes at the sardonic remarks of the soldiers, but the whole book is not shrouded in the same ridiculous black humor that makes up Catch-22. Rather, it is saturated with a feeling of despair of the inescapable horrors of war. Heller obviously exaggerates the absurdity of the situation while O’Brien keeps it much more realistic, often blurring the line between truth and fiction.

            Despite the stark differences in these two authors’ approaches to writing about the war, however, unexpected similarities abound. The same absurdity that exists in the anecdotes of Yossarian’s exploits is inherent in many of O’Brien’s tales as well. For example, the story of Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk, enemies one day (over a simple pocket knife) and best friends the next has a very Heller-esque feel to it.

            So, even though we know that both of these books are fiction – Heller’s even more so than O’Brien’s (if you are willing to accept different degrees of fiction) – neither of them are truly fictional at all. As O’Brien reminds us, something “may not happen and be truer than true.” The portrayal of the complete senselessness of war is what truly matters in both of these books. The approach and the tone and the plot and whatever else the authors use to get that across vary widely, but we are still left with the same disbelief of the horror of war.

Courage

“The old truths are no longer true.  Right spills over into wrong.  Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.  In war you lose sense of the definite.”

Another relationship left out in the quote, is the tension between courage and cowardice.  When Elroy Berdahl takes Tim across the Canadian border, Tim must decide between swimming to the shore and avoiding the draft or staying in the boat and going to Vietnam.  Many consider serving one’s country an act of true courage, but when Tim decides to stay on the boat; the reader only gets the impression of cowardice, because as Tim describes it, “[he] couldn’t make [himself] be brave” and submitted himself (59).  In this situation, the implications of each option have been reversed.  Standing up for his desires against the insults of everybody he knows (real and imagined) and choosing the “cowardly” act of abandoning his country is an act of true courage.  While the inability to face the criticism of patriotism and submitting to his “courageous” duty of serving his country is the mark of a coward. 

In contrast, the desire to willingly do the "brave thing" does not make one a hero either.  In Rat’s story about the transformation of Mary Anne, Mary Anne becomes one of the Green Berets, soldiers who crawl through the jungle in the cover of night and conduct dangerous stealth missions.  Mary Anne, however, is no heroine, she’s a druggie for “that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you’re risking something” (114).  Mary Anne’s lack of fear makes her less human and more animal-like, a change reflected in her changing appearance and decreasing care for hygiene.  Eventually consumed by the forest, Mary Anne becomes, quite literally, a being of nature who acts out of instinct rather than courage. 

Then, what are the criteria for courage?  Doing the “right” thing, as Tim eventually does, does not make one brave.  At the same time, someone who can do the “brave” thing, such as Mary Anne, does not appear to be human or courageous, just crazy.  In the end, courage must be a mixture of correct action and fear.  A courageous individual must have a certain degree of fear for what must be done but also a sense of courage/conviction in what must be done (unlike Tim who simply submits to his role).  The issue of true courage is one of the many ways the reader is put on-notice that they must withdraw any preconceived notions about the meanings associated with words in order to fully understand this book.

The Importance of Our Truths

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. 

I've Never Been to the Rainy River in My LIfe

"The second reason I told you this story is that none of it's true. Or very little of it. It's - invented. No Ellroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, no pig factory, I'm trying to think of what else. I've never been to the Rainy River in my life. Uh, not even close to it. I haven't been within two hundred miles of the place. No boats. But, although the story I invented, it's still true, which is what fiction is all about. Uh, if I were to tell you the literal truth of what happened to me in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight, all I could tell you was that I played golf, and I worried about getting drafted. But that's a crappy story. Isn't it?"
--Tim O'Brien, President's Lecture, 21 April 1999

This quote is from a lecture that O'Brien gave at Brown about The Things They Carried. You can read the rest of the interview here: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WritingVietnam/obrien.html. This quote jarred me when I first read it. If I had to pick one story from the book that was factual, I would have picked On the Rainy River. It's so full of sickening tension -- the scene where O'Brien looks across the river and becomes paralyzed by his decision -- that part made my stomach turn. It was as painful and moving as the death of Curt Lemon/Baby Buffalo, even though there was no death and no violence.

 I was initially upset when I read that the Rainy River story was made up -- this beautiful, melancholy passage -- just a lie. But really, it's not at all a lie. It's more true than the actual events. There's not way to show the gut wrenching anxiety about that summer with the 'truth.' That would have sounded like he only momentarily considered being drafted -- then went back to his strawberry milkshake.

O'Brien is not concerned with what actually happened. He's concerned with conveying the truth about how it makes you feel. And that's where making a story up comes in.

Photo Credit: SpecialKRB http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4117/4823160510_670624d34e_b.jpg

Feelings speak louder than facts. If O'Brien told the truth about the details, he would be lying about the emotions.

The burdens we carry

After our discussion in class today, I began to think more about the title of The Things They Carried and the first chapter of the book. Emotionally, everyone seems to carry certain experiences or memories that make each person unique and impact how they act. What makes the case in this book different is that there is both the emotional baggage of being an individual and there are the physical things that one must carry to both survive and cope with life at war. Some seem to become more aware of the role that certain events or people in their past play in their present when faced with the potential of dying or in an extremely stressful time in war. This was especially true with the relationship between Jimmy Cross and Martha. After he blamed the death of Ted Lavender on his distraction and “dense, crushing love” for Martha, he proceeded to burning all physical ties to her, yet seemed to be troubled when he realized emotional ties cannot be severed quite as easily. 

Everyone seems to be effected by the experiences in their lives and the things that they both knowingly and subconsciously carry as a part of themselves. Although some are more burdensome than others, these things that people bring with them into situations ultimately determine how people react to situations. Even a sibling or family member that could have gone through the same experience seems to have a very different perspective and carry different emotions and understanding of situations. The impact of these sometimes burdensome memories vary depending on the trauma of the situation. Wartimes are going to be much more stressful than normal situations. Tim O’Brien seems to be making this point clear by not only going through the process of writing down some of his own possible memories and also giving the readers a better idea of the immense weight that soldiers feel by the burden of such a confusing war.

A True War Story Never Lives For Long

War stories are never real. Politicians speak of it as if it was a canvas, and they’re painting a picture full of emotions and morals. “THEY DIE WITH VALOR; THEY DIE HEROS”, yeah sounds like something bureaucrats would say. In addition, soldiers’ war stories are never truthful. All the events happen so fast that they can never process the actual truth of what transpired. They are simply telling the beginning and the end. They have no honest idea of what happened in between because wither they were looking away or caught up in their own world. It is the unseen middle events which hold the true war stories, yet they are lost in an instant. The biggest burden for a soldier is not the completion of a mission; it is to find the words that describe the event. No man, woman, child or even soldier can ever find the correct words to tell a war story with accuracy.

War stories are based off human perception; the location of a soldier can create an entirely different story. Consider this example of a Private John (made-up with no relation to the book) was gunned down. One soldier on the left side of Private John said, “As Private John was gunned down he turned away from me as he fell. He died knowing I could not bear to see the light of his eyes disappear”. This is only one perception. Another soldier standing to the right of Private John may say, “As he was gunned down he looked at me with animosity. I knew at that moment he was blaming me for his death”. Which story is true? Each bring different reactions to the table, each tell how Private John died in a different light; the only true fact of the story is that Private John died. If a true war story does not depict emotions or have morals, then was a true war story told? The answer is yes. Only Private John can tell the true story, and with his death the story dies alongside him. The only perception that matters is that of the actual person affected.

Tim O’Brien’s novel and all war stories told are false because each story is written under the perception of a man or a group of men that only witness these events. Granted, they may have lived them and their emotions are real. However, a true war story is not based on these criteria. It is based solely on the individual who experiences ever single moment and almost always it is the soldier that dies, like Lavender.

Fiction or Non-Fiction Does it Matter?

Something that has gone through my head throughout our readings of The Things They Carried is does it really matter whether or not the stories we are reading are true or not? One quote that really resonated with me was, “You don’t know Nam”(p. 93). I can’t speak for everyone but I at least don’t know what the Vietnam War, or any war for that matter, is like. Sure we can read about it in history books but often times the stories are sugar coated to protect some innocence that we as nonmilitary participants possess. If someone did not tell you that this book was fiction you could go about reading it and believe it because anything could happen in war and who are we to say it did not happen? The best part about O’Brien having the freedom of writing fiction is that he can write whatever he deems necessary to both entertain the reader and immerse them in the life of a soldier. Many of these stories could be true and any “lies” he might be making in fact have a purpose. “He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt”(p. 85). Most participants in the Vietnam War are not looking to relive it but these stories attempt to place the inexperienced reader into a world that could only exist in their wildest dreams or in this case fiction. Even as we discussed in class the killing of the water buffalo attempted to relate the pain of losing a friend to the reader. All in all would you as a reader feel any different if this book was labeled non-fiction as opposed to fiction? Or would it change your enjoyment of the book?

What weighs us down

      One can not even begin to imagine the hell the the brave men of the vietnam war experienced. It is through the memoirs and tales of their experiences that we gain a narrow insight into what truly transpired deep within the jungles of Vietnam. This novel is special not only in the stories it tales but also the way in which they are told. The format is set up in such a way that the line between what is truth and what is fiction becomes so blurred that the audience is swayed to believe that what they read is true. That is what I believe makes this novel so effective. We as humans tend to become more attached to things that actually happened hence things that we "believe" to be true affect us just as much.
        Likes Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut there is a basic framework set up around true events which are played upon throughout the course of the novel leading one to believe that what they are reading is true. It is this that allows us to associate ourselves with the characters. Such is the case in The Things They Carried. By spewing off specific weights of items and such, we essentially "feel" the weight that rest upon the shoulders of the men. Likewise, the emotional weight that weigh heavily on the souls of the men becomes our own. Tim O'Brien writes in such vivid detail that he immediately transports us to the frontlines of Vietnam thus making his goal of reaching the readers more effective.

The Feeling of Living

"...and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fire-flight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil-- everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble." (O'Brien, pg. 77) O'Brien describes the truths, especially of war, as "contradictory." However I believe that truths usually are. Everyone has those moments when they feel emotions intensely. When we feel so alive; we can't help but feel the horrible misery and the untainted joy of being alive. That's part of living. Just as in Cat's Cradle the people of San Lorenzo became miserable because they tried to be only happy, we must accept that moments or people do not have to be purely good or bad. That is the beauty of being human; we are so complex, so multi-dimensional that we can never quite figure ourselves, let alone each other, out. This paragraph in The Things They Carried, struck me as inexplicably beautiful. The ability to feel so alive in a time of so much death is one of the miracle of being human. I have not had an experience remotely as traumatic as war, but from my own less exciting life I can easily say that I prefer to feel some sort of pain then to feel nothing at all. Nothing can replace those moments when you feel so sublimely happy, and in the same way we are lucky to care enough to feel pain.

In the Absence of Truth, There is Freedom

In the broadest and most basic view of war, tension exists between one side and the other, whether it be disputes over land, ideological divides, or tensions so old their origins are unknown altogether. Beyond this central conflict, there exists tension within every soldier’s mind as they are burdened with the difficult realities of war. Although war is full of these opposing forces, there is one aspect of war where soldiers are relieved, where they are freed from conflict altogether. This freedom comes with the irrelevancy of truth. As O’Brien explained, war knows no truth. He adds that “the old rules are no longer binding, the old truths are no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos” (78).  Because everything is so muddled, confusing, and foreign to real life, the need to explain the truth disappears. The experiences of war are so brutal and inhumane that, almost as a mental safety precaution, they become incomprehensible to the human mind. To understand them is to lose all faith in humanity. When Rat Kiley kills the baby buffalo, nobody attempts to explain his behavior, to find the meaning behind his brutality. Instead the men stand there and say nothing until Sauders simply says, “Well, that’s Nam” (76).  In normal life, far away from war, we carry the burden of trying to explain why things happen and their meaning. We over analyze, we value the truth over almost everything else. In the hell that was the Vietnam War, morals and truth do not exist at all, thereby freeing the men from struggling over the meaning of events and what is true in their experience. Saunders tells the men to listen for the moral, yet there is nothing but silence. This lack of morality, although dangerous, is also incredibly freeing. O’Brien explains how “there is an aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference-a powerful implacable beauty” (77). In a war filled with extreme brutality and internal turmoil, where the possibility of death creates tension in every moment of every day, the men can seek out this small and beautiful freedom. The weight of morality and the truth become one less thing to carry. 

The Great Exaggerator

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.  

Twisted Truths

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien shares stories from his years as a soldier in Vietnam. Over time, these stories have been embellished in his mind and are now a mixture of both historical fact and his perceptions. The stories become part of his own history because they reflect his emotions during his time in the war and how difficult it was for him to be there. The events that O’Brien went though during the war were burdensome, making it necessary for him to create a narrative to cope with what happened. By placing himself as the narrator of the book, he is the protagonist of the story. However, since it is also a work of fiction, he is also able to detach himself from the events. The actions that O’Brien makes the reader relate to need a type of detachment. When he states, “in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true” (82), O’Brien is explaining to the reader that war is all about perspective. O’Brien also explains that a war zone is so tense, scary, confusing and emotional that it is difficult not to exaggerate or twist the truth. The author explains that war is impossible to “generalize” (81), but in order to tell a story, one must oversimplify information. The narrator’s story about the baby buffalo frightens the reader, who then cannot wait until the segment is over and hopes that it is a fictional story. Even if the passage may be fictional, the emotions O’Brien creates are gut wrenching and realistic. The author forces the reader to participate in this because he or she needs to experience how it might feel to watch a friend die in war. His feelings about the war capture you and compel you to empathize with him. The characters’ realistic emotions are the only truthful aspects of the text, which further allows the author to deceive the reader throughout the story.  

Stability

In Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried, Jimmy Cross, still a young man at the age of 18, receives a summons for the US army to fight in the Vietnam war. Scared and conflicted, Jimmy flees home, and finds refuge at a small inn near the Canadian border. The inn's keeper, Elroy Berdahl, seems at first to be merely the man who takes care of the inn, feeding and providing sustenance to the confused boy. Elroy is described as, "eighty-one years old, skinny and shrunken and mostly bald." But as Jimmy's time there progresses, we begin to see Elroy's role to be much more than a meek hotel manager. Although saying very little to Jimmy, Elroy serves a crucial role in Jimmy's path to a life-changing conclusion. Elroy instantly welcomes Jimmy into his world. They eat every meal together, spend the afternoons playing board games and reading with one another, and Elroy never questions Jimmy about why he was there. Elroy is the calm, steady presence Jimmy needs in order to accept his situation, consider his options, evaluate his own feelings, and eventually come to a decision. It is as if Elroy could feel Jimmy's apprehension, he could feel his anxiety, and he knew there was no need to pry. Elroy was exactly what Jimmy needed, simplicity and stability.
When we find ourselves wavering between paths, or unsure of our own feelings towards a situation, I think the best people to surround ourselves with are ones of stability. By stability, I mean people who are certain of their own values and emotions, and see no need to interject with their opinions on another's situation. For no matter who or how many people we seek advice from, we will in the end do what feels right to us. So, the best person to surround ourselves with in such a time of ambivalence, is simply someone who is there to help us better understand ourselves. Such people are the stable backboard off which we are able to bounce our thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and turn come to consensus within. Elroy serves as this backboard for Jimmy.

O'Brien, Minton, and Jarrell: Three Dudes That Really Don't Like War

It's interesting (and kind of advantageous) to start off a class having read the first two books assigned. Not only do I get the pleasure of re-reading two quality pieces of literature rich with complex themes and devices, I also get the chance to re-examine these works for details and connections that might have before eluded me. Perhaps I'm just a dimwit, but I'd never before thought that O'Brien's The Things They Carried shared much in common with Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. How wrong I was. Thematically, these works explore a lot of the same ground, much more than I initially reckoned, what with their metatextual tendencies and the shared notion that war is a despicable exercise in futility. When O’Brien (the character, not the author [or is it vice versa?]) states that “often in a true war story there is not even a point," (O'Brien 78) a vivid portrait of Newt Hoenniker squeaking, "No damn cat, and no damn cradle" immediately comes to the mind. These phrases carry the same sentiments. I'm also reminded of Horlick Minton and his tribute to the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy (Vonnegut 253). O'Brien's portrayal of the soldiers renders them, in the words of Horlick Minton, as children who, "To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame. . .die like men" (Vonnegut 254). 

Randall Jarrell mirrors these thoughts in his gritty poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”, a work published in 1945 detailing the pointless death of a ball turret gunner (for those who don’t know what a ball turret is, here’s what I’m talking about.) Jarrell, like Vonnegut, fought in World War II, although I’m sure he and O’Brien would also get along quite well judging by their shared perspectives. Notice the way Jarrell matter-of-factly states, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (Line 5). As is, this line resembles the detached style O’Brien sometimes takes ons when talking about the death of men. Throw in some humor and you've got a Vonnegut death, albeit a particularly nasty one. Point being, O'Brien, Vonnegut, and Jarrell were all left with a sour taste in their mouths after witnessing firsthand the merciless impracticality of war. Judging by their works, this burden of a taste doesn't idly remove itself.

Lying Really Isn't That Bad of a Habit

The trouble with lying is that it can never be truly fabricated. It's the all too familiar scene where your parents ask you where you were and you pause a second too long just because you have to pull an answer from nowhere. That's why the truth stings so much. When people lie to you they give you that second to get ready, to prepare, but with the truth is automatic. It hurts more because you have no time to anticipate the coming sentence and the emotions come from a place of power. When Tim O'Brien makes scenes up or plays with the truth or whatever else he is doing in The Things They Carried he pulls everything from an emotional truth. Every emotion in this book truly happened in the war and I think that is what matters.

My favorite chapter in this novel is probably "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" because you never know if it happened or not and you never know if whether it happened or not matters. O'Brien frames it that way in the text, "Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane. This one keeps returning to me" (O'Brien, 85).   Despite his statement of plausible deniability, I feel the story is full of truth. It reeks with the loss, craziness, joy, and submission that war (drawing from other novels and films not personal experience) brings. I think truth does not lie in facts, but in how the presented story makes you react. Throughout this novel, O'Brien plays with how strong facts actually are and I think this chapter is a great example of how it is not the fact of the matter but the emotion of the matter that makes a difference in the truth of the novel. 

Boom- Down Like Cement

           The novel began by describing many stories, and then proceeded to inform the reader that not all of these tales were true. Though I felt slightly betrayed, I could understand what the author was alluding to. The story of a soldier who went AWOL and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, only to return to war because he wanted the "hurt back" (34), and the tale of the soldiers who heard Vietnam "talking" (60) were too longwinded to be true. The descriptions and conclusions that were added made them sounds like stories soldiers enjoyed to say to one another to pass time. The short stories though, the ones that were stripped of all their decorative adjectives and provided the listener with no concrete finale, were the tales that  I found to be the most truthful.

            The story of Ted Lavender, who was shot and then was "Boom-down like cement", made me feel something different (6). Immediately after reading that sentence, I knew it had to be accurate. Feelings of horror and disgust streamed through my blood and straight to my stomach. That sentence,  Boom-down like cement, somehow circumvented my objective and analytical mind and stirred all of my emotions. My mind did not need to process this, to question its validity, because all I needed to know was right there: Boom-down like cement. No one was trying to make me believe he died for a reason or trying to convince me that his death was unique because there was no need to. The facts alone were enough to convince me that this happened. O'Brien wrote that "a true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (74). A true story hits your guts and "boom-down like cement" makes you a believer without any other evidence. 

Why Lying is Hard

A common mantra for writers is, "Write what you know." The logic behind this advice is the simple fact that your story, your poem, your play, etc. will be more vivid, more engaging, more capable of producing that willing suspension of disbelief if it includes information and details that one could only know if one experienced that situation.

I've had this fact confirmed time and again, for as long as I've been writing creatively. I got the most positive feedback on work that derived from my own experience: poems based on childhood memories,  character portraits of family members, etc. It got me wondering: Why do I feel the need to be faithful to these details in my work? I was not bound to "facts" the way historians or biographers are. I've got the raw material--can't I do whatever I want with it?

I began taking risks with my own history. My characters were real people, usually family members or friends, but I made them do new things. I imagined my grandmother pregnant with my mother. I made my brother a paraplegic. (I'm so, so sorry, Tom).

Sure, some might think it's easy to write fiction, because you can throw whatever the hell you want on the page, and no one's going to fact-check it. But fiction comes from somewhere. Maybe it has a little grain of truth, maybe it has a lot. When I began building fiction (or "lies") around the truths of my life, it was just plain hard. Not because I was worried my loved ones would see themselves in it (although that's a legitimate concern as well) but because something about it felt so inherently wrong. Is it okay to create this character, who resembles my own brother in every way, and make him have a terrible accident? Even within the parameters of fiction, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was lying.

Maybe Tim O'Brien felt the same way while writing The Things They Carried, and other "war stories." These soldiers, their actions, their histories and belongings--some of those things probably existed. They've simply been reworked. Is O'Brien insulting the memory of a comrade if he changes his name, has him die by grenade instead of gunshot? Perhaps some would say "yes," but O'Brien clearly says no.

It takes an experienced writer to be able to feel comfortable risking your most personal memories and truths. O'Brien's story story seems so vivid because he knows what he's talking about. He's been there. He doesn't need to have seen the dead baby buffalo, he needs only to have felt those emotions that go along with any act of horror. It is with the emotions, and not with the facts or statistics, that truth lies. (Note pun).

It is my hope that I will eventually be able to take this attitude toward my own writing. When I write about ME ME ME! it only means something to me. If I can take a memory, a feeling, and moment, and make it universal, even if all the whos/whats/where/whens aren't exactly how I recall them, I will have created something larger than myself.

What I Think Tim O'Brien is Doing

           When I first started this book, it appeared to be a simple, albeit beautifully written, work of fiction. However, as the book continued and the author introduced himself as the main character, I grew confused. Was this a work of fiction? Was it all true? Did Tim O’Brien simply enjoy fucking with us? I started looking for a purpose in the confusion. While I’m sure there are many, I was able to discern one that I thought was extremely important. Tim O’Brien seems to be saying that it doesn’t matter if a war story actually happened or not: “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (74). Fancy words are unnecessary, as are beautiful ideas. What Tim O’Brien wants to tell the reader, or at least what he told me, is that war stories never have a point, because war doesn’t have a point. As he states, “a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (65). What this meant to me was that O’Brien doesn’t want his readers to come away from the book feeling like war can be justified or that war is completely terrible. What came across to me from just reading the first eighty-five pages was the feeling that although “war is hell…that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love” (76). All the war stories that try and pigeonhole the feelings of war cannot truly describe the experience because they refuse to acknowledge the good and the bad. After discerning this concept, I thought back to the confusion between fiction and non-fiction, and decided that perhaps it truly does not matter. As long as someone somewhere has felt the same feelings and frustrations that the fictional men experience, the reader should not feel cheated or confused as to whether the book is true. Truth is found in the emotions and humanity of the men, not in their specific actions.  

Gut Feelings

After today’s discussion and re-reading the chapter How to Tell a True War Story, I noticed a double meaning that I had previously passed over. On one hand, the title of the chapter can act as instructions to the reader on how to discern if a war story is true or fictional. But the title is open to another interpretation, that of the author’s character instructing the writer’s character how to tell a war story. This adds a layer of metatextuality because the author could be drawing attention to his character, the writer, and the struggle this character is going through to write war stories that aren’t necessarily real but are still true because they have verisimilitude and reflect the experiences, emotions, and thoughts of those men who were involved in the war. Whether or not there ever was a man named Curt Lemon, whether or not a man named Rat Kiley ever shot a baby water buffalo, those constructs are not as important as the ideas behind them. The chapter on How to Tell a True War Story might be a reflection of that central idea that the semblance of truth is truth in and of itself because of what it can represent and to whom.

                “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis…A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (O’Brien 74). The risk inherent in writing stories like the ones found in The Things They Carried is that people seem to invest reality with more worth than truth, and thus feel slighted or betrayed to learn that these stories aren’t necessarily “real.” “Reality” here is taken to mean the state of things as they actually exist, and thus, people, places and events that are either wholly fictive or fictionalized versions of real events are “not real.” However, this can also be a source of strength for the narrative. Humans tend to react with instinct or gut feelings first, and instincts are, by nature and by definition, shared patterns of behavior. Therefore, instinct represents a kind of commonality, a way of unifying the audience through experience. The stories O’Brien tells have the power of truth because they evoke those instinctual responses that represent more and affect more people than could be accomplished by a story that is strictly “real.” By framing the narrative with a narrator character and a writer character that are distinct but often share roles within the layers of the narrative, O’Brien creates the semblance of truth and also affects the memory of the reader. Parts of stories, themes, and characters make multiple appearances and weave themselves into a nonlinear format, a format not bounded by temporal reality, that closely mimics memory. It is this device that allows the experience to be the focus and brings out those instinctual responses that hold the power of truth. These stories claim to represent truths, not to record realities. And thus, both the writer and the reader must carry these stories in order to experience those truths.

Citations:
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. First Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. New York, NY. 1990. 74.

Reading in Circles

Looking up Tim O’Brien’s history greatly impacted the way that I began to read his novel. In Cat’s Cradle, I was constantly looking for what was the truth and what was the lie, because the line between the two is so obscured. In O’Brien’s novel however, I am constantly searching for what is fictional. Even before the story begins, O’Brien pulls a Vonnegut and slips in an excerpt from John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary. The excerpt plays with the idea of truth and how the reader’s perspective manipulates how the text is being read.  Although the entire text is considered a work of fiction, O’Brian injects himself so blatantly into the story that I began to read the text as autobiographical rather than fictional. The author and the first person narrator are not nearly as detached as they would be in a normal text. Not only does author, Tim O’Brien, give his narrator the same name as himself, he also layers it by making him a writer of war stories. Therefore, we have an author writing a war story, of a writer writing war stories. If that isn’t the definition of convoluted, then I don’t know what is.

            The metatextual content thickens as the writer describes his war stories within the novel: “And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. […] Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). Author Tim O’Brien is almost explicitly stating that memories are a key element in developing a work of fiction. This begs the question of whether this is a book of memories twisted into a story, or a fictional story with events that have an element of truth to them? O’Brien sends the message that although the stories and events may not be true in this novel, the feelings that the stories evoke are what hold truth and meaning.