Past and Future

 

            The characters Cruso from Foe and Tim O’Brien from The Things They Carried hold opposing views about storytelling: Cruso dismisses writing while O’Brien welcomes it. When Susan Barton asks Cruso why he does not keep a journal to recount his experiences on the island, he replies, “Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering” (Foe, 17). For Cruso, the hard and fast truth has no significance. What Cruso values is the terraces that he has attended to, and the hopes that one day a planter will come to the island and sow corn. He holds onto this one, unrealistic hope for the future because after years of being on the island, the days blend into each other. There’s no need to remember everything that’s happened.  

            By contrast, O’Brien says “Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat”(TTTC, 151). He takes the truth as he remembers it and uses it to write stories. For O’Brien, confronting his losses and suffering through writing has become a reflexive action. The intensity of war has left internal conflict that he needs to release. Unlike Cruso, he needs his past to be able to confront his future.

            Ultimately, both men are not all that different from each other. Neither of them values the absolute truth. Cruso chooses to not remember everything whereas O’Brien chooses to remember the truth as it seems to him. Both men are better off living with their own constructs of the past not as it happened, but as they remembered it.