The Things They Carried, Tim OBrien | Analysis

The Things They Carried, Tim OBrien AnalysisTim OBrien, in an interview has discussed the definition of righteousness by saying, You have to understand intimately life itself. There is a truth as we live it there is a truth as we recite it. Those two ar non compatible only the time. There are multiplication when the points truth place be on- gravestoner, I think, than a happening truth (Herzog 120). This definition of truth is a great challenge for readers of OBriens works. It is hard even for the compose himself to distinguish whether a detail is truth or no-truth. In this essay, I will discuss the blurry border between truth and illustration in OBriens Vietnam state of war stories, The Things They Carried.The proficiency that OBrien uses to blend truth and manucircumstanceure in his confine is his use of meta prevarication narrative to describe Vietnam War. Meta assembly is a term given to lyingal musical composition which self-consciously and systematically draws a ttention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. (Patricia Waugh).In the tonic The Things They Carried, Tim OBrien purposely makes the boundary between truth and fiction invisible. For him, truth depends on the context of the situation that someone bears it and what going on in that persons mind. The author starts his book with the quote, This is a work of fiction. Except for a few lucubrate regarding the authors hold life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary(6). However, just few pages later OBrien gives his dedication to the men of alpha Comp each, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa. Ironically, they are all the main characters of the novel. Tim OBrien has already require his readers to notice the blur lines between fiction and fact in his stories. Tim OBrien blurs this line of truth in many ways. He uses truth in his fictio n to make the allegory more(prenominal) believable. The protagonist as well as narrator of The Things They Carried is named Tim OBrien, he also comes from the same town as the author Tim OBrien. The character is a college graduate and is also a drafted Vietnam War vet. He is in his late forties and also is a writer whose book Going After Cacciato got published. Those are obviously more than few details that the character shares with the real OBrien. The author successfully manages deploying his purpose that he wants the readers to feel what he felt. He wants his readers to know why bosh-truth is honestr than happening-truth (203). Hence, readers tin cant help but exhausting to connect the relationship between the narrator with the author. Readers will always need to raises the question of what is reality and what is fiction.Even in the work of fiction, OBrien more than once insists readers to count amours he says is the truth. Before revealing the gruesome story of Rat Kiley slowly killing a baby water buffalo, OBrien writes, This one does it for me. Ive told it beforemany times, many versionsbut heres what in truth happened (78). OBrien confesses that he has told the story in several ways, it means somehow the story has been fictionalized. However, he still convinces readers that but heres what actually happened,. The truth in this story is be tested. Readers know that the story contains fictional detail after being told several different ways they have been notified that The Things They Carried is a fiction. However, they are still to look at the story is true, because the author affirms so. This writing style defines OBriens work as a metafiction where the author consciously challenges the readers to distinguish truth with what he wants readers to believe is truth between the precise blurry line. In this case, according to Lynn Whartons remark, everything is true but nothing authentic (Blyn 189).In the chapter How to Tell a True War Story OBrie n is most clean up in telling his opinion about truth of the war A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of fitting human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done(OBrian 68). Furthermore, In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. Its a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isnt, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the in truth incredible craziness (OBrien 71). OBriens short stories follow these rules. For example, the author describes a group of soldiers was ordered to listen for movements of the Viet Cong in the jungle. After few darknesss, they begins to hears the sounds of a cocktail party soda champagne corks, several simultaneous conversations, opera-style music. Sanders, the soldier telling the story, says, All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because its the mountains. F ollow me? The rock-its talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses (OBrien 74). The definition of a true war story have been established, in this case, the unbelievable fictional details were created in order to tell the real truth from the war.In Speaking of Courage, OBriens fiction become so believable. Readers can easily relate as if they witness this real life story everywhere. The protagonist Norman Bowker cannot restart his life because he cannot accept his self-described lack of courage in the shit field. No one is interested in his war stories any more, Norman becomes depressed by all the horrific memories, the guilt he carries. Readers can see the image of any soldier with PTSD then and now. Though OBrien has said this is a work of fiction (OBrien 5), hence readers need to treat Norman Bowker as a fictional character. However, in this story he is so real as a non-fictional truth. following(a) Speaking of Courage, the author adds Notes, to claim that Norman Bowker wrote to OBrien after the war. He also provides an update that Bowker has killed himself to reinforce the realistic factor in his fictional story. By doing this, more than ever OBrien has created the blurry line between truth and fiction in his works.Although the work is classified as a fiction, OBrien continually emphasizes the truthfulness of stories he tells . This technique creates indecision for the readers, resemble with the uncertainty of the young soldiers must have felt while fighting in Vietnam as the author confides Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? (OBrien 122). Steven Kaplan discusses this point in his essay The Things They Carried includes staging what strength have happened in Vietnam while simultaneously questioning the verity and credibility of the narrative act itself the reader is permitted to experience at first hand the uncertainty that characterized being in Vietnam (Kaplan 48). By blurring the line between fact and fiction, Tim OBrien can objectively speak to readers about war.Throughout the book there are many different versions of the truth. In any war story, but particularly a true one, its difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happenThe angles of vision are skewed (OBrien 71).The story called Spin tells of the Vietnamese soldier that the narrator killed. The story The Man I Killed describes the same dead Vietnamese man and creates a history for him. He loved mathematics (OBrien 142), he had only been a sol dier for a undivided day (OBrien 144), and like the narrator he went to war in order to avoid disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village (OBrien 142). The story Ambush makes the reader wonder whether any of this ever happened. That narrator tells us that he was not the thrower of the grenade that killed the soldier and then Even that story is made up (203). in a true war story, if theres a moral at all, its like the thread that makes the cloth. OBrien keeps giving the readers truth and then revising it or reshaping that truth to something else. The reader is never kinda sure where the real fact is but finds that it does not matter. In OBriens own words, You cant extract the nub without unraveling the deeper meaning (77)For OBrien, truth can change, truth evolves by dint of time and depends on the contexts and circumstances. OBrien also said Truth is fluid. Truth is a function of language. According to the authors own concept about truth, fiction is sometimes can b e also considered truth. His brilliant and humorous example was in 1964 I love Sally is the truth, but in 1965 the truth is I love Jenna. So they are both the truth told by the same person, but are very different just by the time they were told. OBrien said A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. The things they carried as a whole is vastly under the shadow of this definition, where fiction and nonfiction get seperated by a very blurry line where it contains both truths and imaginations. Even for OBrien, he sometimes could not even distinguish what really happened and what he thinks it happened because the border between those two is so paper thin.In OBriens point of view, lives are about stories-the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell opposites. What is really true in our lives as we live it? Might there be events that we view incredibly significant now that we wont remember twenty years from now? Are there trivial details now that might come to have great impact on our lives or teach us incredible lessons? So where is this elusive truth? Truth is what we see from our own personal experience, and truth changes as we live our lives and as we keep remembering things, events, and people in our lives. Truth changes as we mature and as we continue to tell our stories or play them over in our minds. As critic Kaplan says, OBrien saves himself by demonstrating in this book that events have no fixed or final meaning and that the only meaning that events can have is one that emerges momentarily and then shifts and changes each time that the events come alive as they are remembered or represent (Kaplan). In an interview, OBrien was asked What can stories do for us? He said Stories do a lot for us. They can help us heal. They can make us feel part of something bigger. We all tell stories to ourselves-about today and tomorrow-we live our lives based on a story we tell ourselves. And were constantly adjusting ithopin g for a happy ending. (Curran) For him, the key is look forward tofully to learn something or gain some insight from the process of telling and retelling in which truth and non-truth may get blend into each otherwise to make sense.By stating his book is a work of fiction, OBrien gives himself a license to have more room to create and to write even though the materials are based on the truth. OBrien says One of the chapters in The Things They Carried is about a character with my name going to the Canadian border. He meets an old man up there, close to crosses into Canada but doesnt. I never literally did any of these things, but I thought about it. It was all happening in my moons and in my head. And the one thing fiction can do is make it seem real. To let the reader participate in this kid making this journey and it feels like its really happening. You hope the readers asking the same questions that you were back then. You know, like What would I do? Would I go to Canada? What do I think of war? So even if the story never happened, literally, it happened in my head. If I were to tell you the literal truth about that summer, the truth would be that I played a lot of golf and demented a lot about the draft. But thats a crummy story. It doesnt make you feel anything. (Richmond.com). It turns out he did not do the things in the story, but he considered them. The real truth would be boring but the embellished truth is still true. Just because he did not live these things does not mean that they are not true. He has embellished the truth in his head in order to dramatize the moral dilemma for the reader. With the pass he has given to himself in writing fiction base on truth, and letting truth hidden in fiction, everything is believable.In the book The Things They Carried, OBrien says, By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin charge certain truths (OBrien 158). For OBrien, stories can make events happen over again, can bring back to life ones weve lost. He writes, The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head (230). The Things They Carried, then, brings back to life for OBrien lives such as Norman Bowker and Bowkers best friend Kiowa. Since stories can have such an incredible effect, they save us. The us implies OBrien, other veterans, as well as general readers. By using metafiction as a vehicle for the Vietnam War, OBrien is able to discuss with readers why the stories are told and retold. Readers are make better able to understand the aftereffects on veterans and relate to experiences they may never personally undergo. OBrien uses fiction to be able to tell whole truth because the fact is fiction is often closer to the truth than what surrounds us on a daily basis.By explaining to readers how The Things They Carried operates on d ifferent levels, OBrien is arguing that his fiction piece is more straight than nonfiction pieces on the Vietnam War. Even when OBrien exaggerates the truth or changes the details of a story, he does so to make the Vietnam War more real for the readers. As explained by the story of Norman Bowker and in How to Tell a True War Story, for OBrien, the truth of a story depends almost solely on how real the experience seems for the readers. In this way, happening truth remains historically and emotionally distant (Silbergleid 133). If the story is not technically true, at least the reader understands the significance of the event. Silbergleid notes story truth, is full of excruciating detail and specificity (133). OBrien uses story-truth to recreate Vietnam for outsiders.If the readers can fully imagine the shit field where Norman Bowker lost his best friend because of a fast lack of courage, then that story of Vietnam is real. Although a Norman Bowker may not have ever existed, may on ly be a character in the fiction piece The Things They Carried, his experience undoubtedly happened to other soldiers. Even with exaggeration and falsification, the reality of Vietnam is accurately created by OBrien. The character Mitchell Sanders summarizes The Things They Carried best I got a excuse to make, Sanders said. Last night, man, I had to make up a few things. Yeah, but listen, its still true. (OBrien 77)