"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.