The Miracle of Lies

I've often found that someone's best writing comes from the heart, from a place of hurt, passions, and emotions. So that's what I'm going to do now. At first, I wasn't sure if I should put myself out there like this, but I will because I suppose by putting it out there for others to see, it will solidify my purpose and may even show a greater literary significance.

When I was reading the end of The Things They Carried, as O'Brien described Timmy's love for Linda and her subsequent death, I experienced something rather unexpected.

For a while now, I have known that my friend is dying. Over winter break, she was diagnosed with a severe metabolic disorder that causes her body to deteriorate rapidly. She has received treatment, but not even the doctor's know if it worked yet and they won't know for a while. So for now, her life is in some strange limbo, trapped at the point of no return, suspended at the point of acceptance and acquiescence to her fate.

I've known about this for at least a month now and up until now, I had ignored it. I have been pretending that everything my friend told me was a lie or some strange hyperbole that would ultimately give way to an underwhelming, more reasonable reality. I had been lying to myself so I could, perhaps selfishly, go on as if nothing ever happened.

That all changed as I read the end of O'Brien's novel. As I read the passage describing young Linda's death, I felt a surge of emotions I had been waiting for. As I listened to Nick Veenhof tell Timmy how Linda had kicked the bucket, I didn't hear Linda's name but instead, my friend's name. As I watched Timmy close his eyes and whisper Linda's name out of a desperate attempt to bring her back, I saw myself, whispering my friend's name, desperately hoping that she too would come back. And as I watched Timmy look in disbelief at Linda's corpse, I didn't see Timmy at all. Instead, I saw myself, looking at my best friend's dead face, looking at her dead fragile hands, looking down at my friend's dead body.

And I cried. I cried for the first time after hearing about her diagnosis and I cried for the first time ever after reading a book.

Now, of course, this post isn't about my friend's suffering, much like how O'Brien's book isn't necessarily about Vietnam. In that moment of realization, when I finally felt the long-awaited catharsis, I was experiencing the central action of O'Brien's book and a manifestation of Vonnegut's message. Both books undoubtedly discuss how lies function as a coping mechanism in the face of man's bleak existence, whether that existence is ravaged by war or is absolutely meaningless. Vonnegut mocks man's desperate need to believe in lies like religion and social groups in order to handle the meaningless of the reality he lives in. Similarly, the characters within O'Brien's story and arguably O'Brien himself tell themselves stories as a means of coping with the war and death itself. Fiction, in both cases, is a survival mechanism.

That's what I experienced. I experienced the power of fiction--the power of lies--to help a human being cope. As I read the end of O'Brien's novel, and even here, now, as I invent myself, I confront the terrible reality at hand and I learn to cope with it. And while my experience with the novel is perhaps accidental and highly individualized, it nonetheless illustrates the miracle of all writing and storytelling, the miracle of enabling people, in the face of perilous hopelessness, to live on.