Gut Feelings

After today’s discussion and re-reading the chapter How to Tell a True War Story, I noticed a double meaning that I had previously passed over. On one hand, the title of the chapter can act as instructions to the reader on how to discern if a war story is true or fictional. But the title is open to another interpretation, that of the author’s character instructing the writer’s character how to tell a war story. This adds a layer of metatextuality because the author could be drawing attention to his character, the writer, and the struggle this character is going through to write war stories that aren’t necessarily real but are still true because they have verisimilitude and reflect the experiences, emotions, and thoughts of those men who were involved in the war. Whether or not there ever was a man named Curt Lemon, whether or not a man named Rat Kiley ever shot a baby water buffalo, those constructs are not as important as the ideas behind them. The chapter on How to Tell a True War Story might be a reflection of that central idea that the semblance of truth is truth in and of itself because of what it can represent and to whom.

                “True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis…A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” (O’Brien 74). The risk inherent in writing stories like the ones found in The Things They Carried is that people seem to invest reality with more worth than truth, and thus feel slighted or betrayed to learn that these stories aren’t necessarily “real.” “Reality” here is taken to mean the state of things as they actually exist, and thus, people, places and events that are either wholly fictive or fictionalized versions of real events are “not real.” However, this can also be a source of strength for the narrative. Humans tend to react with instinct or gut feelings first, and instincts are, by nature and by definition, shared patterns of behavior. Therefore, instinct represents a kind of commonality, a way of unifying the audience through experience. The stories O’Brien tells have the power of truth because they evoke those instinctual responses that represent more and affect more people than could be accomplished by a story that is strictly “real.” By framing the narrative with a narrator character and a writer character that are distinct but often share roles within the layers of the narrative, O’Brien creates the semblance of truth and also affects the memory of the reader. Parts of stories, themes, and characters make multiple appearances and weave themselves into a nonlinear format, a format not bounded by temporal reality, that closely mimics memory. It is this device that allows the experience to be the focus and brings out those instinctual responses that hold the power of truth. These stories claim to represent truths, not to record realities. And thus, both the writer and the reader must carry these stories in order to experience those truths.

Citations:
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. First Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. New York, NY. 1990. 74.