Real Fiction.

According to ‘freedictionary.com’, “fiction” is defined as “An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.” According to the Collins dictionary, “fiction” is defined as “literary narratives, collectively, which portray imaginary characters or events, specif. novels and short stories.” Does this mean that “The Things They Carried” is not fiction? Whether I am qualified enough to challenge a dictionary’s definition is questionable; however, I will use these definitions to argue that fiction does not have to be entirely ‘made up’ or ‘untrue’.

 The Things They Carried is classified as a fictional novel but contains many ‘true’ events from Tim O’Brien’s life. Even though there are elements of truth, it doesn't mean that it becomes nonfiction. Similarly, in class when we were asked to tell one truth and one lie, most of our lies were ‘true’ in the lives of others or contained pieces of ‘truth’.

In this post I will refer to the author,Tim O’Brien, as “O’Brien” and the character in the story as “Tim” just to make it a little easier.

After doing some research on Tim O’Brien, I realized that the development of the character ‘Tim’ in the book is almost exactly like O’Brien himself. In the story, Tim says, “Forty-three years old and Im still writing war stories.” O’Brien was born in 1946 and published this book in 1990 – making him forty -three when he was writing this book. Similarly, both O’Brien and Tim were drafted in 1968, were against the war, and thought about fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. In that summer of 1968, both O’Brien and Tim worked in the meat -packing job and contemplated their decisions. O’Brien attended Harvard for his Graduate program and on page 39 Tim tells us that he had a “ full scholarship for grad studies at Harvard.” Finally, O’Brien grew up in a town by Lake Okabena, which I learned was a setting for this book. With these few facts, we can see how O’Brien incorporated his ‘true’ life experiences and created a character that is identical to himself. But, now we wonder – how much of this story is true and how much is “imaginative creation”?

Based on the definitions above, fictional works are written with “imaginary characters.” In " The Things They Carried", the characters in this book are representations of "actual" people and some of their experiences. Do we now disregard this book as fiction?

In the pretext, we are introduced to a quote that says, “Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness.” I took this to mean that the experiences you have had will alter your view of this story. If you have experienced similar war trial, then this story becomes very ‘true’ to you. But if not, are we incapable of believing the stories to be ‘true’ and consequently do they become fiction? Can fiction be relative to your experiences?

Tim says, “ You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic emerges and shoots off down a thousand different streets.” After highlighting the immense correlation between Tim and O’Brien, I cannot help but think that this is how O’Brien feels as well. This is why his fictional work is built around nonfiction. This is why his characters are based on actual people, his setting is based on an actual place and his fictional story is based on an actual event.