Sunday, February 16, 2014
That Was Nam
One of the most powerful aspects of Tim O'Brien's writing in The Things They Carried is how openly he describes his own writing of a war story. Periodically, we are reminded of the fictitious nature of even the truest of stories. From his perspective, what we know to be facts are not what add truth to the tales. As he states, "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth." I feel that O'Brien is more concerned with making us part of his experience, and that this uncertainty is what helps him achieve that. Rat Kiley's storytelling technique is characterized by exaggeration as an attempt to ". . .make [the truth] burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt". This is exactly what the author is doing himself; sharing his memories within the same cloud of ambiguity that the soldiers felt in their purposeless fight. In a way, we may feel cheated or lied to, but chronicling his time in the war any other way would be doing the reader a disservice. We don't need to know whether or not the man he killed was a mathematician, but we need to assume it to know what it felt like to end his life.
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O'Brien indeed lies in order for the reader to agree with him. One technique that O'Brien uses is pathos because he uses personal anecdotes to bring up many emotions that make the reader come to the "correct" response. O'Brien will bend (or completely break) the truth in order for the reader to come to the right/"correct" response. This makes me wonder, do people lie to us on a daily basis to get a certain response from us? Is it in human nature to lie to get what you want? As the reader, we give in to what the author says in order to evade this ethical conundrum, and believe whatever is in the text,
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