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).
In our hunt for the "truth," I realized that the source of my frustration was simply the result of my illogical habit of thinking: there is a right and wrong. I should believe in the right. Truth is equivalent to what is right.
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned in my first blog post, I think a lot of rigidness and desire to find truths (regardless of whether or not it exists or is of benefit to us) are taught to us as from early on at a young age as norms. We are conditioned to believe that we can find a clear truth from untruths and that making the distinction from truth and untruth is important. We rarely challenge norms and habits even though we aspire to widen our horizons. So, in many ways, we trap ourselves into a system where we find comfort in patterns and predictability. I find your reference to WALL-E particularly relevant to this as he tries to sort the spork into a category. What difference does it make? Fork, spoon, spork... different shapes and specific uses, but they all serve their role as utensils.
Perhaps, we place too much stress on precision and finding the truth. I wonder if you would enjoy The Things They Carried more if just rereading the story for leisure (and not deliberately trying to find truths or make sense of what is deliberately left vague).