The issue of fiction versus nonfiction in The Things They Carried really bewildered me as I read the first few short stories. I spent a lot of the time worrying about what was real and what was "fake," trying to sort all of the details into these two categories. I especially got frustrated with the parts where O'Brien would say something like "this is true," or in reading the epigraph that says that these experiences are true.
After reading "How to Tell a True War Story," though, the blurry line between fiction and nonfiction in this situation began to make sense. I feel like the goal of these short stories is not to tell what happened or convey a message; it is to put the reader into the soldiers' shoes. If someone wanted a series of events about the Vietnam war, they could look in a history textbook, but it is easy to dismiss these facts as just things that happened. O'Brien wants us to see the war through the eyes of a soldier, though, so he has to stretch the truth or add some details or even make up events that never really happened so that we can get closer to knowing what their experience was.
It also made a lot more sense to me as to why the stories aren't supposed to have morals. If the goal of the stories are for us to spend a day in the life of a soldier in Vietnam, there is no real lesson to be learned. We can't learn from their mistakes or their actions because we don't know if any of them actually happened. This does not mean that there is no point in reading the stories, though. We can get a pretty good sense of what these soldiers felt and went through, and I think that that in itself conveys a pretty good lesson: it is important to try to put yourself in someone else's shoes and walk around in them. By doing this, it helps to become a more understanding person, and it might do some good for other people.
In this case, I think that by reading this book, we are sort of helping veterans of Vietnam: we are making these stories heard and providing an audience to understand what they went through, which is the trouble that Norman Bowker went through in Speaking of Courage. Similarly, in Fire and Forget, writing the war stories may have been a sort of therapeutic way for the authors to work through some of their trauma in Iraq and Afghanistan. By reading these stories, we are hearing something that the authors need to be heard. I don't mean to give us too much credit, though. I think that it is important for us to read these stories to realize how much we take for granted and acknowledge the terrible realities of war.
I definitely agree with you when you say that the point of these stories isn't just to tell a factual story of what happened. Tim O'Brien uses interesting story structure in The Things They Carried to take the audience through what the characters in the book went through. I think he really wants us as readers to just have the sheer experience of a soldier's life through his writing. Regardless of whether everything is true or not, the goal is to have the readers understand what soldiers really go through. We cannot do much but to just read these stories and try to comprehend the feelings and experiences of a soldier. All we can do is try to sympathize and understand what we cannot through these stories and attempt to catch a glimpse of what soldiers go through to protect our country. Great post, this really helps us to grasp the purpose of this book well.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty confusing. He contradicts himself a lot too, which doesn't help. He'll say he didn't kill someone, then talks about killing him. Make up your mind! It also is even more hard to grasp, since the author is named Tim, and so is the main character. This just adds to the confusion we feel reading the more "meta" chapters. Though it's hard to separate O'Brien's stories from fact or fiction, I feel as though that almost makes the emotions and events easier to process. Did these things truly happen? We can hope not.
ReplyDeleteI really loved all the points you made, especially the point that you made about morals in the stories. Tim O'Brien says himself that there is never a moral; he even going as far as to say, “...if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread of the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning." [74] While this might be true, I liked that you made it clear that it doesn't mean that there isn't anything to learn from the stories. The point that you make about how it is important to try and put yourself in someone else's shoes and walk around in them, in my eyes, goes along with the idea of the book being about getting to know the feeling of the war more than the actual story.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why our instinctive reaction as a reader is to make sense of the events that took place. We as readers tend to place emphasis more on the events in a story than on that feeling we have after we sit there staring at the white space on the last page of a story. I think we as readers make sense of characters emotions by trying to relate to their reactions to certain events. When we then find out that these events ( that we believed true) are false it somehow seems to discredit the emotions. I know that the emotions and " truth" of the story are what are important, and that fact versusfiction is not the point. But it is hard to make sense of feelings when we can't decide whether to believe the events that took place.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the first few stories, I felt the exact same way you did! Going into the book, I understood the stories to be fictional but whenever O'Brien would say certain things happened, I became curious and skeptical about what to think. For me, reading "How to Tell a True War Story" made me slightly more inquisitive because he mentioned that certain mundane things are made up and certain crazy or unrealistic things actually happened. Whenever O'Brien tells a story, I try and decipher if the story is mundane or not. It's rather frustrating.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said about putting the reader in the soldiers shoes. I think that in order to create a better "experience" for the reader fiction must be sprinkled into the stories accounting for deeper emotions instead of simple straight up facts. As you said, we have textbooks for just facts and those simply do not do a good job of creating an experience for the reader.
ReplyDeleteYour comments about how such stories help readers who don't have first-hand experience in combat understand something of what soldiers go through in our names call to mind O'Brien's comment in "How to Tell a True War Story" about how, if you don't like how soldiers talk when they return from a war zone, "watch how you vote." Perhaps more than any other kind of short fiction, war stories (especially those dealing with the present day) have an urgent and deep connection to the real world of politics.
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