Under the Ice (9)

In Cat’s Cradle, Jonah summarizes one of the tenets of Bokononism. He describes “the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it” (Cat’s Cradle, p. 284). While one cannot completely escape reality, there are certain necessary foma that must be told in order for the San Lorenzans, and Jonah, to function from day to day.

Tim O’Brien has the same problem as the people of San Lorenzo. Tim can write “true war stories” over and over, each time circling the truth, each time getting closer and closer to what he wants to say, but he’ll never be free of his memories of Vietnam. He can never lie to himself about what he saw there. Tim can call a war story a love story, he can call a gunshot wound a “star-shaped hole” (The Things They Carried, 24), but he’s still haunted by what he saw in Vietnam. He still “wake[s] up his wife and start[s] telling the story to her” (Things They Carried, 82) in the middle of the night. He writes stories as catharsis, but they can’t cover up the memories of the truth.

Tim exaggerates his relationship with Linda at the end of the novel to further muddle the truth. Tim says that they were extremely close and spent a lot of time together, when in reality he barely got to know her. He says, “I loved her and then she died” (Things They Carried, 245). But he takes the lie one level deeper when he says, “I can still see her as if through ice… where there are no bodies at all” (245). Tim uses these mythical “memories” of Linda to escape to a time before he went to Vietnam. By disguising the truth and then lying about it, Tim is attempting to escape the “impossibility of lying” about reality.