I think it is safe to say that O'Brien knows how to write a war story - after all, he has made a living off it. I found it very interesting when in the text he explained how to tell a true war story. This chapter it not the only way O'brien is telling us how to write war stories - he is writing a story, which we can learn from as well. "A true war story is never moral," O'Brien writes. "If at the end of the story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie." He argues that there is no morality to war, no meaning whatsoever. When O'Brien kills a man in the book, there is no thought behind it, but he doesn't seem to feel any remorse. He just can't stop staring in awe at the reality of the body and all its gore. This implies that this novel, then, is not moral.
O'brien writes that a war story can be "true" without being "factually correct." The facts are not important and are often made up. "Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness." Clearly what matters to O'brien in war stories is not "factual correctness." After all, The Things They Carried is a work of fiction. A true war story must convey what it felt like in the war, the truth of the way things were and how the soldiers felt. We don't have to believe that the events of this novel are occurred or that any of its character existed, but that does not diminish the truth of the stories. This method for telling a war story fits with this particular novel, since it is fiction, but if O'brien really believes that the "truth" of war is what is worth telling, what is to say that his non-fiction novels didn't contain some made up events?
I like how you have become suspicious of whether even the "truths" of non-fiction are really facts. This brings up the interesting question of what non-fiction really is, and how telling a story in a non-fiction piece of literature varies from that of a fiction piece of literature. If we are reading an auto-biography for example, we in fact learn much more about a character by how he interprets events and what he constructs to be the truth than we would learn by the basic facts we could have seen as merely an observer.
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