Not Another War Story

Tim O’Brien’s writing is the fictional tale of the life he has lived. He has lived an extraordinary life compared to most of his readers and only through his writing they are able to “feel what (he) felt,” and therefore “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (179). In his writing he begins by generalizing what the characters in this novel carried: “can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags,” then he adds detailed layers of fiction to the character for the readers to feel and understand them. He tells gruesome stories like the senseless death of Kiowa, but then retells them in: “Speaking of Courage,” “In the field” and  “Notes.” In each story he adds a fictional detail that makes the death even more drastic. We learn that Kiowa drowned in a sewage field and died with no dignity. Then we learn the different soldiers view towards the death and how they cope with the death.  Tim O’Brien wants to lay out the full image of things that happened during the Vietnam War and because, he himself did not live all that could have happened, he has to create fictional stories to fully give justice to the war.      

By telling the full story of the Vietnam War, Tim O’Brien is able to better understand his past; he “can look at things (he) never looked at. (He) attaches faces to grief and love and pity and God. (He) can be brave. (He) can make myself feel again” (180). Through his stories he dreams “hoping that others might then dream along with him, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head” (230). He tells these stories to save himself, he has gone through so much in his own life not necessarily due to his own choices and telling these stories and sharing his emotions allows him to heal himself and confront his confusion about the war and about he position in life.  There are different versions of him in the story because he is confused about his place and he has to be these different version due to the war.

By writing the story, he saves himself by better understanding himself and coming to terms. Therefore, “Timmy Saves Tim’s life,” Timmy is his young self the story and Tim is himself. His novel is not like any other typical novel with beginning, end and middle, it is mixture of short stories that combines to make the whole story. It is a form of “metafiction,” in which the author makes the readers determine fiction from reality. This is very important in the set up of Tim’s writing because it forces the reader to draw his or her own conclusion about the story. That I believe is Tim O’Brien’s main goal, he wants his readers to fully understand the Vietnam War and be just as confused as he is.