Coping

We spent last class discussing the fact that, at the end of the day, The Things They Carried is a fictional novel. No matter how attached we became to the characters, no matter how close to the war we felt, no matter how similar the novel is Tim O’Brien’s memoir... Coincidence? Maybe. At this point, I don’t want to say anything is true, or that I am sure of anything…

I still think that writing is O’Brien’s coping mechanism with the war. Irrelevant of what the stories say, what his interviews say, or what his memoir says, he clearly likes to write about war without actually writing about war.

The chapter “Notes” is a metachapter, telling us how to read the rest of the book. O’Brien claims in this chapter “I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet when I received Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse” (152). So, he claims this is not therapy, yet somehow his repressed memories happen to not be paralyzed because he decided to write them down. He still explains in this chapter that he did, however, base chapters off of real stories while adding in other details.

At the end of the day, at the core of this book, are war stories. They aren’t moral, they make us feel skeptical and they do not talk about the actual war. Every veteran needs a way to cope with the reality they once lived; O’Brien’s mechanism was to write that reality.

I might be wrong, I might be right. We probably will never actually know what O’Brien went through during his time in Vietnam, we will never know if the stories we read actually happened (even if they have added details), but at least we have a great book to read.