Coping through Storytelling

“I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins,when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.”

O’Brien explains how memory and storytelling are comforts for times of mourning and how they have equipped him to deal with the painful past. In this extended metaphor, he considers how his need to tell stories evolved through daydreams of Linda. Like Sarah had mentioned earlier, storytelling gives immortality to both the one who has died—in this case Linda, making her alive and able to skate with Timmy in this dream—and the one who tells the story.

I think that storytelling is a good way for O’Brien’s to cope with his traumatic experiences. In a story, the reader can personally experience fear and heroism, love and hate, compassion, sorrow, grief and joy in a controlled and safe environment. We can heal emotional wounds or celebrate life's victories through shared stories.

Perception

Perception is the most important aspect of what we call truth, in the vast majority of situations, especially in The Things They Carried. Perception is responsible for emotion. This is apparent in the differing responses to the story of the water buffalo and Curt Lemon's death. Furthermore, O'Brien's conveyance of emotion in his stories constructs an emotional reality that is just as valuable and, often, just as accurate as what may have actually occurred during his time in Vietnam. Actual occurrence is synonymous with what was perceived to occur by all those involved in the occurrence. Emotional reality creates accuracy through human interactions and often involves a single perception that may appear more accurate. O'Brien's stories anchor in the author's perceptions and their lack of factual truth grants them freedom to be emotionally true and immunity from alternate perceptions of other soldiers. Perceptions also mature and develop. O'Brien's daughter can be representative of the stories, always evolving and growing with new experiences. Changes in perception effectively manipulate past events because only current perceptions are important in reflecting or explaining events in the past. Therefore, it is very hard to “pin down certain truths”(158). This solidifies the significance of emotional truth because emotional truth does not have to rely on certain events. It is the product of great storytelling.

Truths

When we enter into a world of fiction, we know what we are reading is not true. We know that the world is fabricated at least to some extent. Sometimes that world hits close to home and may be eerily accurate, but it is still fabricated. A good story will take us away from the real world around us and put us in this fabricated fictional world so that we believe everything that is said. The Things They Carried does exactly that, and because it is so realistic, not only in plot, setting, in dialog, we react negatively when the author tells us that this is made up and that every story is fake. Then, in the next paragraph he goes on to lie to us again, and we fall for it. We do not like being openly lied to or deceived, even if the story is supposed to take us away from the real world. As readers, we just do not know how to handle being reminded of that. In O’Brien’s book we know that he is an effective writer because even after he tells us that he is fabricating the entire story we still believe him in the remaining chapters and that is only because he is a good storyteller. How and why people tell stories depends on the person, and how effective they are depends on their ability to communicate with others and their control over language. In the novel we see the narrator struggle with how to tell a story and how to tell it properly.

The truth does not matter and what is important in the story varies from person to person. The story about the baby water buffalo, people take it too ways; either you feel awful for the baby animal or for the human who just died. You cannot predict how people will react. Everyone has their own life experiences that allow them to read things in a different light. The one thing this story does universally is show us how much a human can truly carry, whether it is physical, emotional, or spiritual. And that has to do with how real the story is. It does not matter that the story has real events in it, Harry Potter can be believable and it is clearly a fictional series. The characters are believable, the events, the emotion is so true, honest, and bare that we cannot help but believe in the characters and feel their pain. For the characters the story is true, and while we are invested in the book we believe them and they are real, even if it is only while we turn the pages.

"The Redemptive Power of Storytelling"

This phrase appears in the short introduction to the novel on the back leaf of my copy of the book. I think this phrase summarizes my interpretation of the book as well. I thought the novel was a way for Tim O’Brien to redeem his past, to regain possession of the emotions he felt during the war and to “make [himself] feel again” (172). Storytelling can be redemptive also in the sense that it fulfills the “simple need to talk” (152), rescuing one of the perils that arise from simply withholding one’s emotions. Tim O’Brien communicated this idea through his story “Speaking of Courage.” The story itself might not be true but it does convey the idea that O’Brien realizes the stories that we bottle up can eat us up from the inside.

I think simply being present during a war can unsettle your emotional core, making you see life in a different light and feel new things. Storytelling can simply arise from a need for an outlet for this emotional turmoil, a need to express. In the chapter “Good Form,” O’Brien says “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. …… I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God.” To me, what that says is that all the stories and characters in the novel are perhaps metaphors, a means to “objectify [his] own emotions.” (152) Tim O’Brien said in his interview about The Things they Carried that he wrote it because he felt that people needed to know that these things are happening. I think it’s true but I also think that in some sense he did it for himself, out of a need to revisit the things he carried in his past and reflect upon them. I also found it interesting how O’Brien makes a couple of his characters (Lieutenant Cross and Norman Bowker) urge the narrator to tell the world their stories. At first I thought he was trying to express the idea that in writing the novel as a fictional piece, he was sort of generalizing the war experience, speaking not only for himself but also for all his fellow soldiers. But now I feel like what he meant was that the emotions that he relates these characters to urged him to express them. On that note, I also found it interesting how he dedicated the novel to the fictional characters from the book.

Bless the Child

Bless The Child

"I was born amidst the purple waterfalls.
I was weak, yet not unblessed.
Dead to the world. Alive for the journey.
One night I dreamt a white rose withering,
a newborn drowning a lifetime loneliness.
I dreamt all my future. Relived my past.
A witnessed the beauty of the beast"

Where have all the feelings gone?
Why has all the laughter ceased?

Why am I loved only when I'm gone?
Gone back in time to bless the child
Think of me long enough to make a memory
Come bless the child one more time

How can I ever feel again?
Given the chance would I return?

I've never felt so alone in my life
As I drank from a cup which was counting my time
There's a poison drop in this cup of Man
To drink it is to follow the left hand path

"Where have all the feelings gone?
Why is the deadliest sin - to love as I loved you?
Now unblessed, homesick in time,
soon to be freed from care, from human pain.
My tale is the most bitter truth:
Time pays us but with earth & dust, and a dark, silent grave.
Remember, my child: Without innocence the cross is only iron,
hope is only an illusion & Ocean Soul's nothing but a name...

The Child bless thee & keep thee forever"

When we discussed the loss of innocence in class this past week and how Linda’s death might represent it, the first thing that came to my mind was this song by Nightwish. I know I posted a Nightwish song before, but I feel like I need to write about this one because I think it fits perfectly with the theme of the loss of innocence. At the end of “The Things They Carried” the Tim O’Brien in the novel says that he realizes now that he was trying “to save Timmy’s life with a story.” By telling all of the war stories in the novel, he was trying to release himself from the horrors of war; he was trying to reclaim his time of innocence, his inner “Timmy.” This song by Nightwish, Bless the Child speaks about the same thing; the child is a metaphor for innocence.

We start out innocent, completely sheltered from the evils of the world. We are “Alive for the journey,” ready to see what life has in store for us. But as time goes on, this innocence fades away. The “white rose withering” probably refers to the loss of that innocence, as does the “newborn drowning.” Just as Tim O’Brien relives his past (or at least relives his loss of innocence whether the events in the story actually happened to him or not), the speaker in the song relives his/hers.

As time goes on Tim O’Brien and those in his story almost become desensitized to death. Some of them shake the dead men’s hands and they often give the dead a voice. That innocence that we don’t realize we have until we lose it is gone (“why am I loved only when I’m gone”). By writing about his childhood Tim O’Brien revisits that innocence; he has essentially “Gone back in time to bless the child.” When the speaker in Bless the Child asks his/herself whether they would return to that time of innocence if they could, he/she is questioning whether he/she would go back to that state of innocence even if it meant sacrificing everything that was learned up until this point in life. As we get older we acquire more worldly knowledge, but at a high cost. Would you return to being a child, to being completely innocent, even if it meant sacrificing everything you know now? I think Tim O’Brien (in the novel) might.

The stanza “I've never felt so alone in my life/As I drank from a cup which was counting my time/There's a poison drop in this cup of Man/To drink it is to follow the left hand path” indicates the evils of growing up in our society. As we get older, we drink from the “cup” of human civilization, but this cup is poisoned. The aging process poisons our inner child and we all end up following the “left hand path” which is the path to the end of innocence. Left is often thought to represent evil, hence the “left hand path.”

The last stanza of the song talks about death. The speaker is “homesick in time,” they long to return to their childhood, to innocence. But they realize that eventually they will be freed from human pain, they will eventually die. In The Things They Carried, the narrator is freed “from human pain” through telling his stories. He makes the innocence come back to life through these tales.

I think that the last two lines of this song are some of the most interesting. “Without innocence the cross is only iron” clearly refers to religion, but it also has a deeper metaphor. Without religious belief, the cross means nothing; it is literally just a piece of metal. Just as this is true, without innocence, life may not have a meaning. If we are not able to hold onto some of our inner innocence, our inner child, life may not be worth living. Just as Tim O’Brien must hold on to his inner “Timmy” to survive, we must all hold on to our innocence in some shape or form in order to live life to its fullest. The “Ocean Soul” referred to in the last line is an interesting metaphor used often in Nightwish songs. My best interpretation of it is this: an ocean soul is a more sensitive person, a “deeper” person (like the ocean). They long for the purity and innocence of life and prefer to be (figuratively) distant from society to hold onto this part of life. The writer of this song likely believes himself to be an “ocean soul.”

Innocence

I still strongly believe that the things we are left to carry after the end of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried are emotions. Maybe there is something else, another lesson learned, such as the truth of storytelling, but what I can’t leave behind after reading this novel are the emotions I felt while reading it.

Tim O’Brien describes his story in such detail that he creates a reality which draws the reader in until we feel as if it is real. This is a truly incredible talent since he tells us numerous times that the book is full of lies. Regardless though, we are still captivated by his outrageous stories, taking them at face-value. This is similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. In Cat’s Cradle the narrator told us many times that everything in the book was a lie, yet we still are trying to dissect which parts of it are true and which parts are false.

When trying to determine the truth of a story it becomes important to recognize where each person places the value of truth. In The Things They Carried I placed the value of truth on the emotions evoked in me because these rung truer than the details of the story. I may not be able to relate to what the soldiers went through exactly but the detail was so perfect that I could imagine it. By creating powerful emotions in his reader, Tim O’Brien allows his book to speak truly to a broader audience.

In many of his chapters O’Brien writes about a loss of innocence. He mentions many times how the soldiers and medics are simply boys and often portrays them doing childish things to deal with the destruction around them. Two of the soldiers toss a smoke bomb back and forth, others create voices for the dead to deal with the war. Bobby Jorgenson, new to Vietnam, is too scared to help the narrator after he has been shot.

In the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Mary Anne Bell is lost to the war. At first she is a beautiful, innocent young girl hidden from the grasps of Vietnam. Soon, however, she is consumed by it and comes back with tongues hanging around her neck. Obviously, we cannot relate to this story directly, yet we still find ourselves emotionally moving along with it. We feel connected to these characters and can sense the same emotions as them. When the novel ends, we may not remember the name of Mary Anne or which two soldiers were tossing the smoke bomb but we can still relate to and relive the emotions evoked in us while reading these passages.

The Wrong View

There are some stories that are usually interpreted the way they are meant to be. Then there are some that are usually read the completely the wrong way, such as the love story in The Things They Carried. Then there are the stories that most people read right while a small part of the population see some kind of horror within it. So it is for my story.
My grandmother died within the past year. It was in her sleep, so it was peaceful. In most ways, this is the best way to go that some people can ask for. Of course, I was the one who freaked out. Just an hour before, someone had checked in on her and she was sleeping. An hour later and she’s dead.

The idea that she was alive a mere hour before she died had a sense of horror for me. It wasn’t because it was terrible. It was the sense of “what if?” that I found myself associating with the moment. What happened if they had woken her up instead of letting her sleep in? Would she still be alive? Would that have been better? Or would something worse play out afterwards?
I can see the peace in the story now. It doesn’t make everything rose colored about the situation, but it is enough. But through this I can sympathize with O’Brien and his difficultly with getting the story across as a love story. While my story is the exact opposite, there is the common theme that a story is being misinterpreted from the original purpose. The person on the other side of the story is getting some completely different experience. This in itself is a double edge sword. Sometimes authors want their pieces to have the ability to adapt to their reader. But sometimes the story is meant to be seen in one light to be understood to the fullest effects. It is a restriction of how the reader can see the story, but there is a legitimate reason for that.

The love story is something that people look at as a war story mainly because the focus is on the baby buffalo that suffers in the end. It is the thing that draws away a reader’s attention. My attention was taken to the one moment that could have changed the way things played out. It then just became a matter of following through with the thoughts.

I don’t particularly enjoy the thoughts sometimes. But it is the way that I see things play out. At this point, I have accepted all that had happened. It is not so much of a horror story than a different path. However, that is after the fact. That was when we were told it was a love story.

"Interpreting the Variorum." Stanley Fish

An article I read in my philosophy of literature class, "Interpreting the Variorum" argues for the concept of interpretive communities. By this term, Fish means that there are communities that develop that interpret works based on their own cultural values and understandings. These interpretations are thus based on the individual's cultural background. As Fish argues, the skills that we use to interpret works are individually learned and developed as they are traits that are not inherently with us.
Reading The Things they Carried, I began to wonder about the connections between Fish's article and the novel. Identifying the idea of Reader-Response Theory and the strength we put into the belief that the readers hold, at least for Fish, all the power in determining the interpretation, the intentions of the author become minimal. Thus, the section where the narrator becomes angered at the "dumb cooze" for not understanding the story indicates the notion of the reader unable to understand love that comes out of war. The narrator and perhaps other soldiers would instantly see the love expressed in a heartbreaking way for Rat Kiley's friend that had just been killed. However, other upbringings and backgrounds witness the brutal nature of war and its inhuman effects. The duality of these interpretations depends on the cultural lifestyle that you have correspondingly experienced. Yet, according to Fish, the author must be prepared to understand that these interpretive communities will add interpretations that might go against his own intention in writing. In a sense, the intentions of O'Brien in writing seem to be disregarded compared with the larger truths in the writing.
One last point is the idea that certain interpretations of works are just plain wrong. A frequent idea that we pointed to in class was the concept of reading Lolita by Nabokov and instantly believing that the point of the novel was that 12 year old girls are attractive. This interpretation seems to just stray too far into error that it can be discounted based on the sheer idea that this interpretation strays so far away from any other interpretation. This example illustrates the dangers of letting the reader determine the meaning with interpretations that find no logical point. A parallel to this interpretation might be that war is fun and enjoyable after reading The Things they Carried. Authorial intent seems to find some ground to stand on when considering these blatantly false interpretations that would seem to grossly offend the original meaning of the text. However, if evidence is there and you could back up your point, the interpretation might be logical. There comes a point where infinite interpretations of a text do not seem likely and the reader would in fact include interpretations that have no backbone.

The Author's Truths and Our's

Throughout the past week we have been discussing the truth of story telling. We have recently embraced the idea that the truth in storytelling is based on the emotions created within the text. As in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, we feel as if the stories told are based on the emotions felt by O’Brien during his stay in Vietnam. This is to say that an author can convey truth solely based on the emotions he/she can create within his/her reader. In turn, this also creates a stronger connection between the happening truth and the story then creating truth based on more on the characters and situations used.

While the authors intent on creating truth is important. I think it is naïve not to look at the role the reader plays in this situation. There are times in which the reader may dive into a story that the writer intended to be fiction, and come out with something that, to them, is an inherent truth. Inevitably, there are also times in which an author’s truth is found by the reader to be a lie so far beyond the realm of possibility. This is an aspect of story telling that I think is extremely important to point out. If stories are built on a foundation of emotion, then won’t we all build different stories based on our own experiences and the emotions that we have felt through these experiences?

There are points in which the author is able to create emotions in the reader the way he intended to. I have never lost someone that is as close to me as Curt Lemon was to Rat Kiley, but I still seemed to feel the emotions he felt. O’Brien in this sense created a new emotion within me, filling the place that had never experienced a death like that. There are also points (in this book and others) that I find I am feeling emotions O’Brien never made a point to put in. This is where the reader interpretation of past experiences comes into play.

So now, for me, it has become even more confusing trying to sift between the truth the author makes within his text and the truths that we make ourselves from these texts.

And then, fiction becomes reality.

This video directly reflects on the themes of this course and especially on The Things They Carried. I suggest you watch the whole video (it is 6 minutes long)! Here is some important dialogue:

At 1:44--

The guy: "If you could have a memory of anything, real or not... what would it be?"

The girl: "A fake memory? You don't make any sense."

The guy: "I've always been good at that."

At 2:29--

The guy: "What if we had a chance to remember things that we never actually experienced?"

The girl: "What good is it if it never actually happened? No one would believe it."

The guy: "You'd believe it. It's about the feeling--that's what matters."

The girl: "The problem is... I like my stories based on reality, and you like fiction."

At 5:32--

The guy: "And then, fiction becomes reality."

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Much of the dialogue in this short film parallels both class dicussion and what we have seen in The Things They Carried.

Some of us relate more to the guy in this video: he is very abstract and does not care about the distinction between reality and fiction. As he says (much like in classroom dicussion), "It's about the feeling--that's what matters." Yet, others (such as myself) get caught up in reality, much like the girl in this video. I like my stories based on reality, and it's harder for me to care about the story or meaning if it is not true in the sense that it did not happen.

The climax of this video is the greatest connection to The Things They Carried; a fake, fiction story becomes a reality. I think this is a great characteristic of both this novel and this video. In The Things They Carried, the reader is aware that the novel is purely fictional. However, Tim O'Brien does a damn good job of trying to make this fiction become reality. He blurs so many aspects of real life to make his story extremely credible. For example, Tim O'Brien (the author) uses his own name as a character in the story; this makes the reader believe that everything that happens to Tim O'Brien (the character) happened to the author. Furthermore, Tim O'Brien uses other real people, such as his daughter Kathleen--this gives the story more and more credibility. The dedication to the novel is probably the most convincing fiction and reality blend. Tim O'Brien the author dedicated this novel to the fictional characters of his story.

Whether it is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or Wong Fu's Shell, the topics we discuss in class are motifs that each of will encounter in most storytelling. How important is reality in a story? Does it matter if you cannot tell the distinction between what happened and what did not happen?

Janking my Chain

I am annoyed by author Tim O’ Brien. It annoys me that he is a great storyteller and that I kept falling for every one of his words. Maybe there is some truth in the story, I thought and hoped. His characters were just too real, and I could see my uncle in Norman Bowker. It seemed like both of them couldn’t leave the war, spending their days in idle reminiscences, with alcohol here and there to get the memories flowing.

It is these connections that I can make between the characters and real life people that kept me believing that just maybe the book could be true. To an extent I believed that O’ Brien would know that some people would make connections like mine. His writing allows him to see inside you and just grip you, while all he does is tell you lies. The reason we choose to believe the lies can be different.

It could have been O’ Brien’s details that lure you and submerge you into the story, like the way the buffalo was decapitated as we read every word. It could have been the emotions that he displayed and we could feel, like when Kiowa drowned in shit. I personally had to reflect on my uncle’s war stories. The way he told them it wasn’t fun.

The book invests a lot of time in the characters, but we meet them as men during the war not as man fighting in it. We get the sense of danger and death but we never see the way they experience the battle. We mainly see the way they carry themselves to survive the next day. Even O’ Brien jumps in at one point to remind us that the book isn’t a war story. Although he calls it a love story, I don’t agree completely.

In my opinion the last page is where the meaning of the book is wrapped up. The book was a lesson to teach us that we can live forever. Our existence can continue in our words and in our memories. The way we choose to tell a story is the natural way because that’s the way we choose to remember it.

PS. I hate this edit thing....

Bias

It seems as though everywhere I look, I am surrounded with the view that all things natural are moral, virtuous and pure. This high-profile “green” movement has spread across the globe, in the effort to preserve nature and our environment. I often read in books about objects of nature that are meant to symbolize pure and wholesome features. While everywhere I look I seem to come across some message telling me how I should protect nature, I have come to realize that nature is actually a quite dichotomous element. It is deceiving for nature to always be used as an icon for only the good and fruitful aspects of life, when it can also be the source of great destruction and hardship.

I am writing this post in light of the natural disasters that have been devastating communities across the globe, from the wildfires in Texas, to the flooding in the northeast, to the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan. So often, I see the media biased toward the belief that man is destroying nature, e.g. the media coverage of the British Petroleum oil spill, but it ignores the fact that nature often destroys man. My hometown was hit hard by two colliding tropical storms last month and saw great amounts of flooding as a result. The area was declared a federal disaster area. Five people died from their basements collapsing in on them from the weight of the water. Countless houses were wrecked; parts of homes were completely collapsed. After enduring three feet of water, my middle school has to be completely rebuilt, because it is now structurally unsound. Businesses were forced to close, unable to afford reconstruction after the flood damages. All this sadness, all from a flood, all from… too much rain?

Nature has this connotation of being wholesome and beneficial. (Indeed, while I was writing this blog, Microsoft Word listed one of the synonyms of “wholesome” to be “natural.”) But is this connotation really deserved? I am learning more and more from this class to challenge the “givens” in everyday life and analyze them to determine if they really are as simple as they appear to be. The floods that devastated my community have made me see that people have a biased view toward nature. While we should recognize nature for all of its virtuous attributes, we also must not forget the danger and power of nature, an important feature that often gets lost in the midst of all its glorification.

Linda

Every story in The Things They Carried is related to the Vietnam War in some manner except for the last one. Why would O’Brien choose to end a novel about the Vietnam War with a story about a little girl dying of cancer? I think O’Brien ends this way because he wants to make it clear to the readers that this book “wasn’t a war story. It was a love story” (p. 81).

Though a lot of the stories in this book are sad, the story about Linda is the only one that nearly made me tear up. I believe it had that effect because Linda was only a little girl and “Timmy’s” love for her seemed so sincere. It seemed tragic and unfair that she should die so young. However by the end of the chapter, after O’Brien explained how he could bring her back with a story, I was actually somewhat happy and at peace.

Linda’s story was O’Brien’s way of relating his emotions about death, which readers may not have felt when other characters died. He treats Linda as he treats all the other characters that died in this book. After all, the dead soldiers were young boys who narrator O’Brien probably loved just as dearly. He claims that he is still in fact “Timmy,” or his childhood self, and is dealing with their deaths the way “Timmy” would. Just as he dreamed Linda back to life, he tries to keep all of “the dead alive with stories” (p. 226).

The truth of O’Brien’s story is not about the war. We cannot trust that any of the details of the novel are true, including the story about Linda. I think that the emotions I experienced when reading about Linda are what O’Brien experiences every time he dreams up a story about the dead. The truth that O’Brien is trying to communicate is that even after a loved one dies, you can keep them alive with stories, fact or fiction.

Truth VS Truth

I am extremely conflicted in my impression of this book. And I think this reflects the very nature of the stories presented in The Things They Carried. They are conflicted: true, not true, true, not true. Happening-truth, story-truth. A maelstrom of fiction and non-fiction that sometimes feels raw and poignant and sometimes feels exaggerated and fake. Throughout most of the book, I wanted to take O’Brien by the shoulders and demand to know exactly what’s true and what’s fabricated. He is a sly fox though. I doubt he would answer even if I had him chained upside down and tickled the soles of his feet for days. He addressed this in the book:

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the might in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. (O’Brien 152)

This awed and aggravated me in equal amounts.

It was pure frustration yesterday as I reorganized my room and stumbled upon the Pixar movie, WALL-E. Remember when WALL-E is holding the spork and looking left to right? Does it belong with the forks or the spoons? Forks? Spoons? Fiction? Non-fiction? Darn you, O’Brien.

And that is where the conflict arose –should truth be the truth of what realistically happened? Or, should it be the truth of what it felt like to be there and witness all the blood, gore, and loss? The Things They Carried is based on enough truth to get me where it hurts and where it matters. In “the Nam,” in the jungle, there was a platoon of young men. Some of them died, some of them did not. Tim O’Brien did not, and he has tried his best to heal and memorialize; and I believe that he has done that. The beauty of this book lies not necessarily in the war stories at its center, but rather in the undulating, overlapping entanglements that are people’s lives, in the act of using storytelling as a means of bringing the many facets of fragmented memory forward into the present day. O’Brien constructed and reconstructed his own experiences in order that they convey the real truth, far beyond the “truth” of what really happened and what did not. He pieced together the fragments to form a unified, disjointed, fictional, honest whole. As O’Brien writes, “In the end a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight” (81).