This book is a work of fiction, and therefore the people Tim O’Brien wrote about are not real and the stories are
not factual. However, the way Tim O’Brien wrote this book makes you wonder if
some of these stories and characters are in fact real. An example of this can be found with the character Norman Bowker, especially in the chapter “Notes”. In that
chapter, the narrator Tim O’Brien discusses the story he told in the previous
chapter called “Speaking of Courage”. In the chapter “Notes”, it feels like Tim
O’Brien the author is narrating, causing the chapter to read more like a memoir.
Due to that, it leads the reader to believe that what he wrote about was factual, along with the people he wrote about. The meta-textual chapters such as this one cause the line between the author Tim O’Brien and the narrator Tim O’Brien
to become fuzzy. When that distinction becomes confusing, the characters become confusing as well. To
complicate matters even more, O’Brien includes Norman Bowker in the dedication
page. Typically books are dedicated to real people, not fictional characters. I
wonder why O’Brien chose to do this? Maybe Norman Bowker represents many men
that served in the war, and by dedicating this book to that character, he is
actually dedicating the book to all of those men.
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ReplyDeleteI also wondered whether the characters are based on actual people. It would seem extremely odd to dedicate a book to figments of the imagination. I think that O'Brien could have based his characters off of people that he served with. In order to keep the book interesting, he created all new details to make a cohesive story. There is no doubt that without his experience in the Vietnam War, O'Brien could never write this book. You can tell that he has been to war and back by his writing style. I also think that O'Brien heard stories, and continued those stories under the "fiction" title. Whether real or fake, the characters in The Things They Carried do make a convincing story not just about war, but what happened before war starts and what happens after war ended.
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