Throughout The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. By giving the narrator his own name, it becomes impossible to know whether or not any given event in the book actually happened to him. This confusion is heightened when his characters contradict themselves in the collection of stories, thus making the truth of any statement questionable. This intentional blending of fact and fiction demonstrates that the objective truth of a war story—in fact, make that any story—is less relevant than the actual telling of a story. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them. O’Brien is not writing a history of the Vietnam War. Statements such as “This is true,” which opens “How to Tell a True War Story,” do not establish that the events recounted in the story actually occurred. Rather, they indicate that the stylistic and thematic content of the story is true to the experience of the soldiers in the war. O’Brien’s assertion that the truest part of this story is that it contains no moral underscores the idea that the purpose of stories is to relate the truth of an experience, not to manufacture false emotions in their audiences.
Since several of the stories in The Things They Carried are told from O’Brien’s point of view twenty years after the war, facts have become cloudy, and all that remains of the experience are the lingering feelings and memories. He is aware of his omissions and exaggeration of detail, and in the case of “Good Form,” he even suggests that all of his previous stories are fiction. Even if he did not actually kill a soldier in My Khe, the truth of his feelings about war is no less valid. He explains, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth (171).” Sometimes, in storytelling, factual truth is not as important as emotional truth. O’Brien himself says that his goal is to make his readers believe. His priority is not on the facts, but on our identification with his feelings. O’Brien’s characters and contentions are just as powerful and valid if the facts and logistics behind them were made up.
Love your post and completely agree that the novel is a form of perceiving the war in a non-factual way and that perception is conveyed through emotion.
ReplyDeleteIn my workshop group, one of the members talked about how we perceive an event to have occurred is more important and meaningful than what the absolute facts of that event are. Moreover, our perception, to an extent, is based on our emotions. In the novel, the narrator Tim O'Brien does not want to go to war and does not understand why there is a war. His thought process influences his view on Vietnam, as you mentioned, by his inability to find a moral.
So, perhaps all of the "rules" to storytelling mentioned in the novel are also lies that O'Brien made up. If the ultimate point of storytelling is to convey truthful emotion and part of that feeling is uncertainty, then maybe it is acceptable to not have an ending. There is no "good form," only successful storytelling, however way you want to tell it.