Reading in Circles

Looking up Tim O’Brien’s history greatly impacted the way that I began to read his novel. In Cat’s Cradle, I was constantly looking for what was the truth and what was the lie, because the line between the two is so obscured. In O’Brien’s novel however, I am constantly searching for what is fictional. Even before the story begins, O’Brien pulls a Vonnegut and slips in an excerpt from John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary. The excerpt plays with the idea of truth and how the reader’s perspective manipulates how the text is being read.  Although the entire text is considered a work of fiction, O’Brian injects himself so blatantly into the story that I began to read the text as autobiographical rather than fictional. The author and the first person narrator are not nearly as detached as they would be in a normal text. Not only does author, Tim O’Brien, give his narrator the same name as himself, he also layers it by making him a writer of war stories. Therefore, we have an author writing a war story, of a writer writing war stories. If that isn’t the definition of convoluted, then I don’t know what is.

            The metatextual content thickens as the writer describes his war stories within the novel: “And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. […] Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). Author Tim O’Brien is almost explicitly stating that memories are a key element in developing a work of fiction. This begs the question of whether this is a book of memories twisted into a story, or a fictional story with events that have an element of truth to them? O’Brien sends the message that although the stories and events may not be true in this novel, the feelings that the stories evoke are what hold truth and meaning.