The True Truth

This is my second time reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and it was with great anticipation that I reached the chapter titled Good Form. It’s been through the lens of this chapter that I have been reading and interpreting the works that we have been reading in this class so far. While obviously there were some details that I had forgotten since the first time I read the novel, the idea of a “story-truth” being truer than a “happening-truth” has been in my mind throughout the whole class. However, this knowledge has not been as helpful as I thought it might have been when I first read the syllabus and saw the book list. While I think I have some idea of what O’Brien is trying to express, in that events that never actually occurred can greater express the emotions and thoughts and situations than retelling the “happening-truth”, I find it hard to apply this message to our most previous reading, Cat’s Cradle. One of the main take-aways I had from Cat’s Cradle is that man tries to construct meaning from the reality around himself wherever possible, even if he has to lie to himself to do so. It seems as though The Things They Carried occurs in the opposite order, where meaning has already been felt or lost, and the surroundings themselves are what are being invented.

At one point O’Brien says that “Stories are for joining the past to the future… Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). Once again I find it difficult to reconcile this idea with the paradox presented in Cat’s Cradle, where in life there exists “the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it” (CC 284). It seems to me that Vonnegut views it as impossible to fully escape the realities of one’s situation through invented “stories”, while O’Brien sees it as impossible to ever fully capture the realities of one’s situation without these invented stories. Vonnegut seems to think that in the end reality is final and inescapable while O’Brien suggests that in the end all that survives is not the “truth” but rather stories.