People Who Never Listen

        We talked at the beginning of this book about truth and whether the events of The Things They Carried were fictional or factually accurate, and if that even mattered. I was really not interested in this discussion at first. I don't like when authors try to get all "meta" and play with the power they have over a reader. I didn't like it when O'Brien included a section where he was talking to another character in the book about the book he was writing because it took away from the momentum of the story for me, to suddenly jump forward in time and start questioning the reliability of the author. As it turns out, that structure continues to be the norm for this book and while the reliability of O'Brien's narration has been completely shredded, I'm actually okay with it.

        In class today there were several angry outbursts against O'Brien for presenting his stories as truth and then revealing practically everything to be made up. At first, he gets away with this through characters like Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders, by framing stories such as the singing rocks or "The Sweetheart of Tra Bong" as Kiley's invention as opposed to his own. But slowly he starts to admit to more and more stories where he himself has played with the details, as seen where he talks to the woman who misinterpreted his baby buffalo story: "All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. ... Beginning to end, you tell her, it's all made up (81)." Since this specific scene was in the short story entitled "How to Tell a True War Story," I think O'Brien again got away with it. But by the time we reach "The Man I Killed" and "Speaking of Courage," and become emotionally engrossed in O'Brien's pain and guilt and Norman Bowker's lack of direction and Kiowa's death, only to have the events of these stories blasted to pieces by "Good Form" and "Notes," O'Brien has suddenly crossed a line and we're angry. There's an irritation that comes from an author just completely toying with the reader's emotions and reality and never telling what actually happened. It's kind of infuriating and people were even talking about a level of disrespect this shows to factual accounts of death and to actual soldiers, especially if O'Brien is basing this on real people and using their real names. While it is certainly frustrating to have entire plot lines be discarded by a single sentence, I don't quite agree with the backlash against O'Brien for telling his story this way.

         The essence of the book, as O'Brien has repeated so many times, isn't related to whether or not specific events actually happened, but whether a certain genuine emotion can be conveyed to a non-veteran audience. The essence of the book is O'Brien trying to tell someone who has never been to Vietnam, never fired a gun, never seen a loved one die before their eyes or a village in flames, what his experience was like. It's about his struggle to simply talk to people who haven't gone through what he has. While I certainly understand the anger over emotionally charged events being completely made up, for a book that repeatedly emphasizes that fact doesn't matter, I think you have to kind of be expecting that sort of move on O'Brien's part and go along with his claim that he can still tell you what the war was like this way. As we observed at the start, the subtitle is "A Work of Fiction by Tim O'Brien." Though the epigraph is from a diary and seems to claim the book is based on fact, I think it's clear by this point in reading that the epigraph is actually supporting the subtitle and the book's fictional (but true) nature.

        "Those who have had any experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest."

The main thing I took away from this when I first read it was the distinction between those who have fought and those "others" who have no experience. It is immediately clear that this is an enormous division between two groups of people and one can simply not comprehend the other. In the context of O'Brien's book, the epigraph is saying that those who fought in Vietnam will recognize the war and their own experience of it in his text--even though they would not have experienced these exact events, it would not matter, they would understand. Those who didn't fight, however, would take his words as exact truth because we cannot understand or base it on any experience of our own, we must wholeheartedly believe everything O'Brien says. But his goal is for us to understand the emotional trauma they went through, not for us to ingrain specific memories of it into our heads. The quote never really says "everything here is a statement of actual things," only that it is truthful. And in the context of O'Brien's definition of truth, we know that doesn't mean factual accuracy. As infuriating as it may be, O'Brien's style has actually grown on me as I've come to terms with this book as a post-war story, not a war story as I had originally anticipated. I interpret it to be about the impossibility of returning to complete normality after such an experience, about the struggle to relate to people, the struggle to communicate such intense feelings. It's about a veteran trying to express emotion to an audience who doesn't listen, except to traumatic, unbelievable, fictionalized stories that encompass direct and obvious personal pain or guilt or suffering. It's about the disconnect between veterans and everyone else, and I think our strong reactions and need for stability only reinforce that this disconnect exists.

"It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen" (81).

        All that being said. I do think the debate about disrespecting other soldiers is kind of interesting and I don't really know what to say about it except that I'd be curious to hear what other veterans thought of O'Brien's definition of a "true" story.