As we have been reading the stories in The Things They Carried, the narrator's reliability has been outright dismissed in the book itself. This has caused a strong reaction among many people in the class, for reasons I completely understand. However, this has done little to change my opinion of the book; I have no qualms about the fact that there is no way to be certain of the facticity of what we are reading.
O'Brien has written a work of fiction, which he declared at the beginning of the book. We have no way of knowing whether or not events in the stories took place. The book is dedicated to real people who served in the military with O'Brien, and share the names of the characters in the book. What it appears O'Brien has done is this: he used events and people from the Vietnam War to tell stories, and played with the facticity to make the stories better. Some could claim this is disrespectful to the people who died, but O'Brien created a false persona for himself in the book: he has no daughter in real life, but the narrator does. In his view, he is making the stories more "true"--an opinion I agree with. The stories are true to the experiences of the soldiers in Vietnam, as we are led to believe. I think this was one of his goals, and he achieved it. He represented the psychological, and physical effects the war carried on those involved.We can reconcile his treatment of fact, and certain people's memory by the book being fiction, and its achievement in this respect of "truth.
I think there was one more reason O'Brien wrote the stories, and he talks about it in "The Lives of the Dead." In writing the stories, he reanimates the people he lost--and has a little bit more time to spend with them. This justifies, in my mind, any wrongdoing on his part.
This book has been very different from others in that the narrator challenges his own credibility. This can be very disturbing, causing some to wonder what is fact, but still, all the stories are true, in O'Brien's sense of the word. This is part of what made the book so compelling. It didn't matter what happened, if any of it did, or if all of it did. O'Brien wrote an incredibly powerful work, and so, I am not bothered by the details.
