Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried
“Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth." This concept may be confusing to those who read Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried, for the first time. By using a number of different literary devices, such as juxtaposition, paradox, metaphors, and metafiction, O'Brien separates truth and fact from one and the other in his novel about his time in the Vietnam War. He shows the truth of what he was feeling through the war and after without being factual. O'Brien's explanation for not being totally factual in the book was that “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” “It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make
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it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.” How can something about the real world be truthful though, yet not be what actually happened?
This is the question that O'Brien flings at the reader in the chapter "Notes".
According to O'Brien, that contrary to what it would seem, a lot of the events that passed in the book didn't actually happen. In fact, he admits that most of the content is fictitious in nature. However, there are many instances that readers may not believe that anything in the book is not real; O'Brien masterfully incorporates so much emotion and thought-provoking content within each section of the book that it almost seems like it actually happened. Even in the last few pages of the chapter "The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong", where Mary Anne, a girl who had been described as an American sweetheart, is described as having a string of tongues hanging around her neck in a room of incense and strange and almost mystical music, the surreal yet frighteningly palpable way that O'Brien presents the whole scene prevents people from outright insisting that such an episode did not occur. Other incidents that seem much more realistic, such as the story of "On the Rainy River" and the dual chapters of "The Man I Killed" and "Ambush", appear to be much more realistic, but even so, O'Brien insists that none of all that actually happened. He says that he was merely "trying to bring together the myriad of forgotten feelings and memories" by telling fabricated yet truthful stories. By using the art of meta-fiction as well as a variety of literary devices and an unforgettably haunting and haunted tone to tell his …show more content…
story, O'Brien achieved to create a balance between facts and truths to deliver various themes and messages to the reader.
"On the Rainy River" was one of many chapters that used the tool of storytelling and the anecdote to convey O'Brien's messages, themes, and emotions to the audience. In this particular chapter, O'Brien brings to life an evoking and seemingly realistic story about choosing between what was right and what was wrong. Working in a slaughterhouse and driving away to the river and staying at the lodge all seemed like plausible scenarios, but in reality, none of that actually happened. He had never worked in a slaughterhouse. He had never driven all that way up towards the Canadian border; in fact, he never drove away from his town at all. Even so, the chapter was entirely truthful. By using this story of "On the Rainy River", O'Brien captured the emotions and thoughts that had been running through his head when he was first enlisted and delivered it in a neat little package to the audience to digest. From this chapter, readers understand the turmoil that was raging on in O'Brien's head, and we learn some of some of his moral values as well. Thus, the audience may see that the truth in this chapter was the truth of what he was feeling, though the facts were all untruthful.
One pervading truth that the audience may glean from O'Brien's moral values is that the fear of being a coward is a very powerful motivator. In "On the Rainy River", we learn that O'Brien's viewpoint on what is courageous and what is not is very personalized, as he regards courage as the ability to do what you truly know in your heart to be true in spite of all the haters that may come to your door. Torn between the choice of fleeing the country or staying behind to fight for his nation, his mind is a swirl of emotion that initially prevents him from making a decision. He believed that the brave thing to do would be to run away and not for his something that was so completely against his belief system. However, he knew that if he ran, people would be shameful of him and brand him as a coward, a label that he would hate for others to put on him. Thus, he considered the 'coward's' option to be to return home and not escape from being enlisted. In fact, the final line of the chapter ties all of it up by saying "I was a coward. I went to war." And so, O'Brien goes to war in Vietnam. This whole chapter is made all the more impressionable by the audience's preconception of what courage is. A majority of the audience would, prior to reading the novel, think that being courageous would have been to go to war and that the cowardly thing would have been to run away. This creates a paradox between what the audience thinks they know to be true and what O'Brien knows that he knows to be true. While O'Brien believed that the courageous thing would've been to not go to war, the readers would have a preconceived idea that the courageous thing would have been the exact opposite. This whole theme of cowardice versus heroicness comes up not only in this chapter, but in earlier and later chapters as well, in particular "The Man I Killed" and the very first chapter of the novel, "The Things They Carried."
In the chapter "The Things They Carried", O'Brien says "Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment." This says a lot about why men tried not to escape enlistment and shows their values as well, as they all seemed to think that going to war and killing people would make them seem more courageous or at the very least less cowardly as they would've seemed if they didn't go to fight for their country. Though this fear of 'embarrassment' may not be the sole reason why everyone enlisted in the war, it is still a truth. There is no fact in that sentence; only truth and truth
alone.
Between two chapters named "The Man I Killed" and "Ambush", O'Brien craftily puts in juxtaposition between the narrator and the Vietnamese soldier that he had killed. He did this primarily by presenting a history of the dead soldier not unlike that of himself. "He was a citizen and a soldier." "He could have been taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege. He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter." It is through this particular passage in the book that O'Brien so clearly alludes to himself, doing so by the means of another person. Both men were citizens who knew their duty, but had no desire to take responsibility for it. They were both men of letters, not guns. In this respect, we may see both O'Brien and the man he killed as mirrored copies of each other. In this respect, we may also interpret O'Brien's killing of the man and the speechlessness and numbness he felt as and after he killed the Vietnamese man is a symbolic way of saying that he recognized that his old life and self had been killed in the war violently and suddenly. Through this, we can see that O'Brien is trying to allude to the fact that war changes people. In a later chapter called "The Ghost Soldiers", O'Brien describes how people change in one neatly phrased metaphor. "You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believe in." Soldiers molted out of the 'skins' that they first had on prior to entering the war, and once they had shed those skins, there was no getting them back. This idea was a truthful theme throughout the novel, yet the actual situation where O'Brien killed the man never happened. This is explained in the chapter "Good Form", which serves as a sort of author's note but in the middle of the novel.
In "Good Form", O'Brien explains his decision to tell the story not as how it actually went. To do this, he writes two consecutive paragraphs:
"Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief."
"Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him."
In this case, the 'story-truth' hits the reader more hard-on because it's written as a specific, personal experience that the author went through, and it wasn't as generalized as the 'happening-truth' was. Specific imagery, such as "He lay in the center of a red clay trail" and "…the other eye was a star-shaped hole" help to build fixed and vivid snapshot that subconsciously settles in the reader's mind. Building a specific image such as this scene instead of a general statement about how O'Brien had seen a lot of dead bodies helps to send the theme across. In a speech he gave at the Arlington Library, O'Brien says that the selected passage was not real, and that there was "no hand grenade, no star-shaped hole- all those details are a product of a novelist's imagination." He continues, saying that "there were dozens or fifty ambushes" while he was on tour, and that one story about the man he killed in the book was his "way of gathering all those ambushes and the feelings of terror in one story". By doing so, O'Brien has given us a message saying that through the whole time he was in Vietnam, he felt a sense of responsibility and even guilt towards the deaths of the Vietnamese civilians. Because of how O'Brien had exhibited the contrast between story-truth and the happening-truth, I felt connected to O'Brien and the emotions that he had been feeling. The story had been written in a way that even I, a civilian who had never been to war in my life, could understand, and that, I think, is what makes the book so riveting to readers.
it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.” How can something about the real world be truthful though, yet not be what actually happened?
This is the question that O'Brien flings at the reader in the chapter "Notes".
According to O'Brien, that contrary to what it would seem, a lot of the events that passed in the book didn't actually happen. In fact, he admits that most of the content is fictitious in nature. However, there are many instances that readers may not believe that anything in the book is not real; O'Brien masterfully incorporates so much emotion and thought-provoking content within each section of the book that it almost seems like it actually happened. Even in the last few pages of the chapter "The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong", where Mary Anne, a girl who had been described as an American sweetheart, is described as having a string of tongues hanging around her neck in a room of incense and strange and almost mystical music, the surreal yet frighteningly palpable way that O'Brien presents the whole scene prevents people from outright insisting that such an episode did not occur. Other incidents that seem much more realistic, such as the story of "On the Rainy River" and the dual chapters of "The Man I Killed" and "Ambush", appear to be much more realistic, but even so, O'Brien insists that none of all that actually happened. He says that he was merely "trying to bring together the myriad of forgotten feelings and memories" by telling fabricated yet truthful stories. By using the art of meta-fiction as well as a variety of literary devices and an unforgettably haunting and haunted tone to tell his …show more content…
story, O'Brien achieved to create a balance between facts and truths to deliver various themes and messages to the reader.
"On the Rainy River" was one of many chapters that used the tool of storytelling and the anecdote to convey O'Brien's messages, themes, and emotions to the audience. In this particular chapter, O'Brien brings to life an evoking and seemingly realistic story about choosing between what was right and what was wrong. Working in a slaughterhouse and driving away to the river and staying at the lodge all seemed like plausible scenarios, but in reality, none of that actually happened. He had never worked in a slaughterhouse. He had never driven all that way up towards the Canadian border; in fact, he never drove away from his town at all. Even so, the chapter was entirely truthful. By using this story of "On the Rainy River", O'Brien captured the emotions and thoughts that had been running through his head when he was first enlisted and delivered it in a neat little package to the audience to digest. From this chapter, readers understand the turmoil that was raging on in O'Brien's head, and we learn some of some of his moral values as well. Thus, the audience may see that the truth in this chapter was the truth of what he was feeling, though the facts were all untruthful.
One pervading truth that the audience may glean from O'Brien's moral values is that the fear of being a coward is a very powerful motivator. In "On the Rainy River", we learn that O'Brien's viewpoint on what is courageous and what is not is very personalized, as he regards courage as the ability to do what you truly know in your heart to be true in spite of all the haters that may come to your door. Torn between the choice of fleeing the country or staying behind to fight for his nation, his mind is a swirl of emotion that initially prevents him from making a decision. He believed that the brave thing to do would be to run away and not for his something that was so completely against his belief system. However, he knew that if he ran, people would be shameful of him and brand him as a coward, a label that he would hate for others to put on him. Thus, he considered the 'coward's' option to be to return home and not escape from being enlisted. In fact, the final line of the chapter ties all of it up by saying "I was a coward. I went to war." And so, O'Brien goes to war in Vietnam. This whole chapter is made all the more impressionable by the audience's preconception of what courage is. A majority of the audience would, prior to reading the novel, think that being courageous would have been to go to war and that the cowardly thing would have been to run away. This creates a paradox between what the audience thinks they know to be true and what O'Brien knows that he knows to be true. While O'Brien believed that the courageous thing would've been to not go to war, the readers would have a preconceived idea that the courageous thing would have been the exact opposite. This whole theme of cowardice versus heroicness comes up not only in this chapter, but in earlier and later chapters as well, in particular "The Man I Killed" and the very first chapter of the novel, "The Things They Carried."
In the chapter "The Things They Carried", O'Brien says "Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment." This says a lot about why men tried not to escape enlistment and shows their values as well, as they all seemed to think that going to war and killing people would make them seem more courageous or at the very least less cowardly as they would've seemed if they didn't go to fight for their country. Though this fear of 'embarrassment' may not be the sole reason why everyone enlisted in the war, it is still a truth. There is no fact in that sentence; only truth and truth
alone.
Between two chapters named "The Man I Killed" and "Ambush", O'Brien craftily puts in juxtaposition between the narrator and the Vietnamese soldier that he had killed. He did this primarily by presenting a history of the dead soldier not unlike that of himself. "He was a citizen and a soldier." "He could have been taught that to defend the land was a man's highest duty and highest privilege. He had accepted this. It was never open to question. Secretly though, it also frightened him. He was not a fighter." It is through this particular passage in the book that O'Brien so clearly alludes to himself, doing so by the means of another person. Both men were citizens who knew their duty, but had no desire to take responsibility for it. They were both men of letters, not guns. In this respect, we may see both O'Brien and the man he killed as mirrored copies of each other. In this respect, we may also interpret O'Brien's killing of the man and the speechlessness and numbness he felt as and after he killed the Vietnamese man is a symbolic way of saying that he recognized that his old life and self had been killed in the war violently and suddenly. Through this, we can see that O'Brien is trying to allude to the fact that war changes people. In a later chapter called "The Ghost Soldiers", O'Brien describes how people change in one neatly phrased metaphor. "You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believe in." Soldiers molted out of the 'skins' that they first had on prior to entering the war, and once they had shed those skins, there was no getting them back. This idea was a truthful theme throughout the novel, yet the actual situation where O'Brien killed the man never happened. This is explained in the chapter "Good Form", which serves as a sort of author's note but in the middle of the novel.
In "Good Form", O'Brien explains his decision to tell the story not as how it actually went. To do this, he writes two consecutive paragraphs:
"Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief."
"Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him."
In this case, the 'story-truth' hits the reader more hard-on because it's written as a specific, personal experience that the author went through, and it wasn't as generalized as the 'happening-truth' was. Specific imagery, such as "He lay in the center of a red clay trail" and "…the other eye was a star-shaped hole" help to build fixed and vivid snapshot that subconsciously settles in the reader's mind. Building a specific image such as this scene instead of a general statement about how O'Brien had seen a lot of dead bodies helps to send the theme across. In a speech he gave at the Arlington Library, O'Brien says that the selected passage was not real, and that there was "no hand grenade, no star-shaped hole- all those details are a product of a novelist's imagination." He continues, saying that "there were dozens or fifty ambushes" while he was on tour, and that one story about the man he killed in the book was his "way of gathering all those ambushes and the feelings of terror in one story". By doing so, O'Brien has given us a message saying that through the whole time he was in Vietnam, he felt a sense of responsibility and even guilt towards the deaths of the Vietnamese civilians. Because of how O'Brien had exhibited the contrast between story-truth and the happening-truth, I felt connected to O'Brien and the emotions that he had been feeling. The story had been written in a way that even I, a civilian who had never been to war in my life, could understand, and that, I think, is what makes the book so riveting to readers.