Truth and Meaning: A Blurry Line

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a compilation of war stories, interspersed with O’Brien's – the so-called fictional writer’s – narratives reflecting on how, exactly, one tells a war story. In chapters like “How to Tell a True War Story” (65), O’Brien discusses the characteristics of a real war story: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it.” Later on, in the chapter entitled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (85), Rat Kiley’s telling of the story about Mary Anne Bell is continually interrupted by his caveats and clarifications, as well as Mitchell Sanders’ interruptions to admonish Rat for telling the story ‘wrong’: leaving out the ending, including too much subjectivity among what should be the cold hard facts, and marring the ‘truth’ of the story with his commentary – to which Rat replies with his own storytelling beliefs, that his commentary would “bracket the full range of meaning.” It seems that while half of O’Brien’s novel thus far centers on narratives of war stories, the most significant discussions lie in those about storytelling itself.

One notion clearly present in The Things They Carried, then, contrasts what I considered to be one of the messages of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Both texts center on the discussion of truth in storytelling, but Vonnegut’s message, neatly summed up in the metaphor of the game of cat’s cradle itself, is clear: the reader searches and searches for meaning in a text, twisting and unraveling its strings of lies and fiction, and is left, inexorably, with an empty circle – “no damn cat, no damn cradle” (Vonnegut 166). So much of O’Brien’s novel, though, centers on the discussion of finding your own meaning in a text - a discussion usually accompanied by a debate about cold hard facts versus subjective emotion, ending in the resolution that while hard facts may tell the ‘truths’ of a story, emotion gives the reader the indescribable ‘feeling’ of actually being there to witness it. The fact that O’Brien’s notion of storytelling appears to be much more fluid, based not in hard fact but in the reader’s intuition and using their own interpretation of the narrator’s emotions to paint a picture of the event, seems to contrast Vonnegut’s ultimatum of truth and meaning – while both texts are certainly similar in their focus on truth and meaning, it seems that O’Brien illustrates the concepts as significantly more relative than we may think.