Certain Obligations

"Jesus Christ, it's against the rules....I mean, you got certain obligations" (O'Brien 107). This is Mitchell Sanders's reaction to the end of Rat Kiley's story. Or rather, the lack of an end.  Like most every reader, Sanders has expectations as to where the story is going and the checkpoints it has to meet while getting there. After all, it's "against human nature" (107) to leave a story unfinished! Consistent pacing, a suspenseful plot, a resolution--these are all things readers indignantly crave. Tell it right or don't tell it at all.

Rat Kiley, obviously, doesn't care about any authorial obligations. He interrupts his own story with "half-baked commentary" (101) and is said to have a "compulsion to rev up the facts" (85). But this is Rat's way of telling the truth. The exaggeration isn't meant to deceive. Instead, it's supposed to make you feel what happened. "For Rat Kiley...facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around" (85). Sifting out the shards of fact shouldn't matter because the raw emotion of the story is where the whole truth lies.

In the larger context of this book, Rat and Mitchell's conversation represents O'Brien's relationship with his audience. He is Rat, trying to show us that a war story can be true even if it never happened, disregarding his so-called obligations as keeper of the tale.  There is no baby buffalo or Mitchell Sanders or Rat Kiley, and O'Brien says that every time he tells the story there is someone who can't see that. We expect to derive truth from facts, just as we expect every story to have an end. That just simply isn't always the case.