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.
I, too, wasn't really bothered by whether the events portrayed in the book were 100% true. As he mentions many times, it's not what the story contains but the feelings and emotions it conveys. While a particular event may be extremely scarring for someone, that event may need to be amplified and even warped so the audience feels the same way. Because of this, I respect everything O'Brien wrote in the book, and also don't think the soldiers he dedicated it to were too offended.
ReplyDeleteI must say that, initially, I was a little bothered by the fact that parts of his stories weren't true. Maybe it's just the way kept reminding us about it, but because of his constant reminder of his fabrication in his stories, it made it hard to get emerced in the book. I would get attached and moved, and then O'Brien would pause to state that something weren't true. I do understand the emotional goal that O'Brien had in mind, I just think it could have been executed differently so the book didn't seem so choppy.
ReplyDeleteThe truth for me didn't really bother me throughout the book. In fiction it is about making the reader believe that it is real, and whether or not the events truly happened does not take away from my belief. O'Brian tells us about his lies, but without this knowledge, I would never have guessed we were lied to. For me it is whether or not I believe in the words on the page that makes the story true or false.
ReplyDeleteOne aspect of this book that I especially like is the way that we see stories being passed around *within* the Vietnam context. In a sense, by (re)telling the stories in the context of this book, O'Brien is simply participating in what the soldiers seem to do anyway. Mitchell Sanders is the best representative of this narrational impulse in wartime, as he's not only a storyteller himself but also the one who likes to draw (often sardonic and dark) "morals" from the stories that are told. He's also a critic of form and style, who insists that a story be told "right." And O'Brien writes a lot about how these stories circulated and reflected gut-level "truths" about the soldiers' experience and the often surreal context of Vietnam. In a sense, his book simply picks up this practice in written form.
ReplyDeleteJust like many other people who commented on this post, I agree that the truthfulness of the narrator was not really a defining factor in my enjoyment of "The Things They Carried." The subject of O'Brien's honesty is discussed in "How to Tell a True War Story" and in several other parts of the "meta-narrative" of the book. I believe that, as you stated, this is clearly a work of fiction and the changes O'Brien make to the truth seem to generally improve the accessibility, narrative, and overall quality of the stories in this novel. The one exception to this may perhaps be the confusing comments O'Brien makes after telling the story about Kiowa's death.
ReplyDeleteGood points! At first, I was a little annoyed that Tim wasn't a reliable narrator, but the more I read, the less it bothered me. O'Brien's stories were moving even if they might not have been completely true. The powerful emotions in the stories were more important to me than the accuracy of the events.
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