I read The Things They Carried my junior year of high school. A few days ago, when I was reintroduced to the book again in this class, I learned that I was led astray by my teacher junior year. Not once did we mention that The Things They Carried was a work of fiction. Instead, my teacher presented the book to us in such a realistic way that our discussions ended up being about posttraumatic stress disorder and the effects of war. She made our purpose in reading the book to be a lesson in the realities of war.
Rereading it, in this class, under a totally new light, I cant help but feel kind of cheated. I thought that the war stories were at least based off of O’Brien’s personal experience (I guess that’s still up for debate considering our class discussion today). But even still, I took the stories as they were presented to me, as truths. Part of me took the book so seriously because its about war. Society teaches you to treat veterans and their stories with the utmost respect, and rightfully so. They were brave, they fought for our freedom, they made the ultimate sacrifice. So who am I to say that their stories never happened, I have never been to war. And if what we have established so far in class (that when we “remember” things get skewed out of proportion) I don’t even have the slightest clue as to what its actually like. What I’m trying to say in all this is that being “lied to” is never a good feeling, but when it comes to “lying” about war stories, it hurts that much more.
Even if I learn nothing from now until the end of this class, it was still worth taking. I am no longer the blind-trusting reader that I was in the past. Truth, Lies and Lit has taught me to question the “truthfulness” of authors and pay closer attention to details that I would normally read right over.
I had a very similar experience with the novel. Last year it was the freshman requirement summer reading and when we discussed the novel as a group, we treated the stories as truth and tried to extrapolate what war must be like based on O'Brien's, now potentially false, accounts.
ReplyDeleteIt never occurred to me to question what O'Brien wrote. Throughout the novel he untruths certain stories-telling the audience that he has just recounted a lie or that some aspects of the stories may have been invented. To me, this interference by the narrator gave validity to the other stories because they were left untouched. The most true story, to me, was the water buffalo one because the narrator tells us that he still tells that story to this day. Similar to class, everyone in my group felt sympathy towards the water buffalo, but now I wonder if that even happened. Not that its truthfulness takes away from our reactions to it.
I love that you are both discussing this text under the rubric of having to *reread* it... and that this rereading has resulted in a rethinking of the text and its effects. However, be very careful that in recognizing the fictive construction of the narrative you don't discount the "truth" of its telling. Perhaps O'Brien's stories of the war in this particular novel are exactly the "true story that never happened"! (iow: the fictive quality of the stories do not necessarily make these war stories any less reflective of war itself...)
ReplyDeleteI agree “even if I learn nothing from now until the end of this class, it was still worth taking”. For the same reason as well; the first and perhaps most important lesson I have learned so far in Truth Lies and Literature is never believe the believable. Simply because an author is an author, or a narrator is a narrator, does not mean that the text is true. The Things They Carried to me is both a simple read and a struggle. If it wasn’t for the manipulation and constant curiosity of what is real in texts I would be reading the story and not having to re read, or constantly wonder if I am being lied to. If it was not for this course I would never have questioned what is real and what is not in a story, because a story is a story and I was the reader who trusted the author. Now I know, some author’s are far from trustable. A generalization I am trying to stay away from myself, elaboration is not necessarily lies. Like jas said, don't be mistaken the fictive quality, don't let it take away from the hidden realities of the story.
ReplyDelete