Introduction. *Author and the Work.

In Tim O'Brien's semi autobiographical war novel, set in the Vietnam War of the 1970's, The
Things They Carried.

 A thumb-nail sketch of what happens - In the book, O'Brien describes not only the
physical equipment with which soldiers were burdened, but the emotioal baggage
that they are laden with, both during and after the war.
 Now derive the themes from this material: One of the major themes in the novel is
the problems of communication faced by the soldiers when attempting to tell those at
home of the experiences they face, which none of those dear to them are equipped
to deal with. There is also a continual contrast between the world of war, and the
complacent world they left behind, together with a psychological assessment of the
kind of trauma each of the soldiers has to deal with.
 Now provide a list of the techniques by which these themes are carried: As it is
difficult to tell readers exactly what such horrors were like, and O'Brien is concerned
with 'How to tell a war story' We find that the same incidents are dealt with over and
over again, from a different point of view, etc............

Body of the essay

Each of your statements about a techinique, will become the topic sentence of a body
paragraph, but it must be restated in different words, to avoid the obvious. At the same time,
by yout introductory list, you have already shown the reader how you will be structuring your
essay - now in following this plan, he knows exactly where ytou are going.

Conclusion

is a restatement of the themes and the techniques use to convey, or articulate those themes,
again re-expressed in different terms, so that firt yo tell the reader what you are going to tell
him; then you tell him it; then you tell him what you have told him.

This essay is based upon the basic, and only quetion that can really be asked of a work of
literature: "What are the themes and how are those ideas conveyed" However, there are
hundreds of different ways of disguising this question, or of limiting the material you have to
cover. Therefore, you have to address the operative terms of the question in yout
introduction: there are two kinds of operative term, those which tell you what to do with your
naterial, e.g., describe, discuss, evaluate, analyse, compare and contrast, etc; and those
which describe the materials you need to discuss, whether themes, point of view, setting,
characters, etc.

If, for instance, the question limits you to characters - cheat! Deal with how the character is
established. (the word HOW in
a literary essay usually means 'by what techniques?')

Therefore you may say that: the character is a product of his setting. You may say that the
cahracter carries certain themes. You may say that he is created through the use of
characteristic images, or symbols, or a particular writing style. You may say that our
understanding of him depends upon his likeness to or differences from other characters - in
other words this is the list of techniques that the essay will derive its structure from!
 [(essay date spring 2003) In the following
essay, Blyn debates the
effectiveness of stories as agents of healing and redemption on
individuals and a nation by exploring such issues in The Things They
Carried.]

"But this too is true," Tim O'Brien's narrator

insists in the first line of
the chapter that concludes The Things They Carried: "Stories can
save us" (224). Entitled this final chapter
thus begins with a promise not only of healing, but of redemption as
well. Stories, the narrator suggests, can heal the traumatized veteran
of the Vietnam War and provoke an amnesiac nation into "working
through" its troubled past. [(essay date spring 2003) In the following essay, Blyn debates the
effectiveness of stories as agents of healing and redemption on individuals and a nation by
exploring such issues in The Things They Carried.]
"But this too is true," Tim O'Brien's narrator insists in the first line of the chapter that
concludes The Things They Carried: "Stories can save us" (224). Entitled "The Lives of the
Dead," this final chapter thus begins with a promise not only of healing, but of redemption as
well. Stories, the narrator suggests, can heal the traumatized veteran of the Vietnam War
and provoke an amnesiac nation into "working through" its troubled past. If, as John
Hellmann has written, "the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation
of the past and vision of the future" (x), then O'Brien's narrator apparently points "the
disrupted story" and the nation toward a narrative cure. Such a reading of The Things They
Carried, however, requires a denial of the novel's insistent destabilization of the "true" and its
dogged attempts to render war unequivocally beyond redemption. Shifting attention from the
final chapter's first line to its concluding passage makes visible the extent to which the novel
challenges the narrative cure that its narrator ostensibly affirms.
The idea of stories as a curative force is attractive, particularly because it suggests that, as a
collection of stories about American soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried performs
the narrative cure it prescribes, redeeming the reader and the writer at once. Prepared to be
"saved," the producer and the receiver of the stories are poised for the closure traditionally
accomplished in the final chapter of a war story. For, as Paul Fussell explains in his The
Great War and Modern Memory, the third and final stage of the war narrative is the
"reconsideration," in which the pre-war understanding of the world is replaced by the deeper
insights made painfully clear by the war experience (130). Closure entails both a loss of
innocence and redemption in the form of a richer appreciation for the complexities of the
human condition. By beginning the final chapter with an assertion that "stories can save us,"
O'Brien apparently promises just this kind of "reconsideration." To the contrary, however,
the chapter concludes with an image of suspension and spin that reflects a profound sense
of cultural ambiguity. It is an image that recalls the critique of narrative structure first
undertaken in chapter 3, aptly entitled "Spin," and expanded on four chapters later in "How
to Tell a True War Story."
At the end of "The Lives of the Dead," an older "Tim" imagines a younger "Timmy" skating
on a frozen lake with his childhood sweetheart, Linda. Tim writes:
I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history,
moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a
high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save
Timmy's life with a story.(246)
Because this is the passage with which the novel concludes, the question of whether or not
Tim is ultimately able to save his younger self "with a story" remains unresolved. Moreover,
the reference to "loops" and "spins" links this image both to the circular path of memory and
to the problem of the narrative "spin" known as "the war story." In the chapter entitled "Spin,"
the unending repetitions of the memory "loop" function as a check against the falsifications
of the war story and its conventional "spins."
As a chapter, "Spin" exposes the desire that generates the genre of the war story, a
dangerous and insipid desire to redeem what the narrator calls the "waste" of war (68). Like
"The Lives of the Dead," it begins with a statement that the rest of the chapter throws into
question: "The War wasn't all terror and violence," the narrator tells us, "Sometimes things
could almost get sweet" (31). What follows, however, is a series of vignettes that are
anything but "sweet." When a Vietnamese boy with a plastic leg approaches an American
soldier with a chocolate bar, the soldier reflects, "One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker
ran out of ammo" (31). When the

same soldier steals his friend's puppy, "strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and
squeezed the firing device," he responds with an ironic affirmation of the initiation right of the
conventional war story: "What's everyone so upset about? ... I mean, Christ, I'm just
a boy" (37). Here, the novel renders ironic both the loss of innocence and the
"reconsideration" that structure the traditional war story. The positive spin that underlies the
war story as a genre emerges here only as a bankrupt fantasy. Thus in "How to Tell a True
War
Story," the narrator warns, "If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war
story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from
the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie" (68).
Aimed at exposing this "old and terrible lie," these chapters refute any narrative structure
that would redeem the war, the storyteller, or the audience to which it is directed.
Against the comforts and closure of the war story, "Spin" reveals the circular repetitions and
reenactments of traumatic memory.
In "Spin," memory itself is depicted as a loop:
The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while,
then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots down a thousand
different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things
down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.(35)
Evoking the compulsive repetitions of traumatic memory, the narrator here characterizes
stories not as the road to closure, but as "obsession," a kind of psychological "traffic."
Effectively, this loop describes the structure of "Spin" and of The Things They
Carried as a whole. For in place of tales of moral uplift and the persistence of human
goodness, tales structured to provide the catharsis of Aristotelian tragedy, "Spin" offers the
ambiguous, the unfinished, and the wound that will not succumb to the narrative cure.

Keeping the wound open, O'Brien's text prevents the neat closure and false redemption of
the traditional war story.
Given that the "spin" and the "loop" are terms central to the novel's critique of war stories
and their specious attempts to reclaim meaning from the war experience, the final passage
of "The Lives of the Dead" may be seen as a direct challenge to the sentence that begins it.
Rather than confirming that "stories can save us" by redeeming the past and healing all
wounds, Timmy's acrobatic performance on the frozen pond may be seen as a reiteration of
the "memory-traffic" (35) and its obsessive art. Prohibiting closure, The Things They
Carried keeps the past from disappearing into the dead clichés of the war story, replacing
redemption with a critical engagement with the past.
Works Cited
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 1975.
Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1990.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Blyn, Robin. "O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by
Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 211, Gale, 2006. Gale Literature Resource Center,
[Link]/apps/doc/H1100067477/LitRC? u=auclib&sid=bookmark-
LitRC&xid=260c6335. Accessed 9 Feb. 2022.
Originally published in Explicator, vol. 61, no. 3, Spring 2003, p. 189., as John Hellmann has
written, "the
legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of
the past and vision of the future" (x), then O'Brien's narrator
apparently points "the disrupted story" and the nation toward a
narrative cure. Such a reading of The Things They

Carried, however, requires a denial of the

novel's insistent
destabilization of the "true" and its dogged attempts to render war
unequivocally beyond redemption. Shifting attention from the final
chapter's first line to its concluding passage makes visible the extent
to which the novel challenges the narrative cure that its narrator
ostensibly affirms.

The idea of stories as a curative force is

attractive, particularly
because it suggests that, as a collection of stories about American
soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried performs the narrative
cure it prescribes, redeeming the reader and the writer at once.
Prepared to be "saved," the producer and the receiver of the stories
are poised for the closure traditionally accomplished in the final
chapter of a war story. For, as Paul Fussell explains in his The Great
War and Modern Memory, the third and final stage of the war
narrative is the "reconsideration," in which the pre-war understanding
of the world is replaced by the deeper insights made painfully clear by
the war experience (130). Closure entails both a loss of innocence
and redemption in the form of a richer appreciation for the
complexities of the human condition. By beginning the final chapter
with an assertion that "stories can save us," O'Brien apparently
promises just this kind of "reconsideration." To the contrary, however,
 the chapter concludes with an image of
suspension and spin that
reflects a profound sense of cultural ambiguity. It is an image that
recalls the critique of narrative structure first undertaken in chapter 3,
aptly entitled and expanded on four chapters later in "How to
Tell a True War Story."

At the end of an older "Tim" imagines a

younger "Timmy" skating on a frozen lake with his childhood
sweetheart, Linda. Tim writes:

I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm

skimming across the surface
of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades,
doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and
come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save
Timmy's life with a story.(246)

Because this is the passage with which the

novel concludes, the
question of whether or not Tim is ultimately able to save his younger
self "with a story" remains unresolved. Moreover, the reference to
"loops" and "spins" links this image both to the circular path of
memory and to the problem of the narrative "spin" known as "the war
story." In the chapter entitled the unending repetitions of the
memory "loop" function as a check against the falsifications of the
war story and its conventional "spins."

As a chapter, exposes the desire that generates

the genre of
the war story, a dangerous and insipid desire to redeem what the
narrator calls the "waste" of war (68). Like "The Lives of the
Dead," it begins with a statement that the rest of the chapter throws
into question: "The War wasn't all terror and violence," the narrator
tells us, "Sometimes things could almost get sweet" (31). What
follows, however, is a series of vignettes that are anything but
"sweet." When a Vietnamese boy with a plastic leg approaches an
American soldier with a chocolate bar, the soldier reflects, "One leg,
for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo" (31). When the
 same soldier steals his friend's puppy, "strapped
it to a Claymore
antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device," he responds with
an ironic affirmation of the initiation right of the conventional war
story: "What's everyone so upset about? ... I mean, Christ, I'm just

a boy" (37). Here, the novel renders ironic both the loss of innocence
and the "reconsideration" that structure the traditional war story. The
positive spin that underlies the war story as a genre emerges here
only as a bankrupt fantasy. Thus in "How to Tell a True War

Story," the narrator warns, "If a story seems moral, do not believe it.
If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some
small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then
you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie" (68).
Aimed at exposing this "old and terrible lie," these chapters refute any
narrative structure that would redeem the war, the storyteller, or the
audience to which it is directed.

Against the comforts and closure of the war

story, reveals the
circular repetitions and reenactments of traumatic memory.

In memory itself is depicted as a loop:

The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on

your head, where it goes
in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the
traffic merges and shoots down a thousand different streets. As a
writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things
down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those
stories.(35)

Evoking the compulsive repetitions of traumatic

memory, the narrator
here characterizes stories not as the road to closure, but as
"obsession," a kind of psychological "traffic." Effectively, this loop
describes the structure of and of The Things They

Carried as a whole. For in place of tales of

moral uplift and the
persistence of human goodness, tales structured to provide the
catharsis of Aristotelian tragedy, offers the ambiguous, the
unfinished, and the wound that will not succumb to the narrative cure.
 Keeping the wound open, O'Brien's text
prevents the neat closure
and false redemption of the traditional war story.

Given that the "spin" and the "loop" are terms

central to the novel's
critique of war stories and their specious attempts to reclaim meaning
from the war experience, the final passage of "The Lives of the
Dead" may be seen as a direct challenge to the sentence that begins
it. Rather than confirming that "stories can save us" by redeeming the
past and healing all wounds, Timmy's acrobatic performance on the
frozen pond may be seen as a reiteration of the "memory-traffic" (35)
and its obsessive art. Prohibiting closure, The Things They

Carried keeps the past from disappearing into

the dead clichés of the
war story, replacing redemption with a critical engagement with the
past.

Works Cited
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern
Memory. New York: Oxford
UP, 1975.

Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy

of Vietnam. New
York: Columbia UP, 1986.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New

York: Broadway, 1990.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale,

COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale,
Cengage Learning

Source Citation

Source Citation
 MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition
Chicago 17th Edition Harvard

Blyn, Robin. "O'Brien's The Things They

Carried." Contemporary Literary
Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 211, Gale, 2006. Gale Literature
Resource Center, [Link]/apps/doc/H1100067477/LitRC?
u=auclib&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=260c6335. Accessed 9 Feb. 2022.

Unreliable Memoirist: The Tim O’Briens of The Things They

Carried
Citation metadata

Author: Ginger Jones

Date: 2016

From: Narrative Being vs. Narrating Being

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Reprint In: Contemporary Literary Criticism(Vol. 485. )

Document Type: Critical essay

Length: 4,474 words

Main content
[(essay date 2016) In the following essay, Jones notes that many readers distrust the
memoir form and discusses how O’Brien addresses the problem by creating a fiction that
relies on memoir, “enticing a reader to perpetually decode some truth hidden behind a war
story, while being constantly reminded that what feels true and authentic is in fact a literary
construction.”]
Were the writer Tim O’Brien to speak with the characters in his “work of fiction” The Things
They Carried, he would talk to the novel’s narrator and protagonist, also named Tim O’Brien,
who claims that a true war story is a story that matters to whoever hears the story, and is
directed to “people who never listen.” O’Brien’s novel problematizes the adjective “true” by
rendering truth as a relationship between language (description) and knowledge (memory).
O’Brien is well-known for writing works that appear to document his recollections of the
Vietnam War, but according to O’Brien, in fact describe not memories, but realities. As
Wesley writes, “fighting a war is a matter of personal experience—the effect of weapons on
bodies,” yet “inevitably imposes a compromised version on the interpretation of genuine
experience.”
Consider a reader disinclined to engage emotionally or even intellectually with the history of
the Vietnam War (as Americans call it—the Vietnamese call it the American War, while
Europeans refer to the Second Indochina War). Such a reader might dismiss a particular war
memoir as subjective or anecdotal or statistically unrepresentative. He or she would more
readily dismiss a work of fiction as fantastic or simply false. How would this “un-ideal” reader
classify The Things They Carried, a collection of stories, commentaries, and vignettes
narrated by a protagonist usually in first-person perspective, often in third) with the same
name, age, profession, education, and military experience as its author? O’Brien attempts a
fiction that continually hugs the coastline between the solid land of memoir and the open sea
of fiction, thereby enticing a reader to perpetually decode some truth hidden behind a war
story, while being constantly reminded that what feels true and authentic is in fact a literary
construction. When reading The Things They Carried, one is constantly revising one’s
understanding of what to consider part of the oral history of a war, what to dismiss as
fantasy, and where the line between the fictional narrator and real author lies. In perpetually
questioning what is true and what is false about what one senses and is being told, readers
are compelled to undergo something of the peculiar experience of serving as an American
combat soldier in late-60s Vietnam. The narrative compels the reader to engage with it in a
manner that makes it part of his or her own experience, forestalling the tendency of a reader
to distance himself or herself from what appears to be neither a subjective report nor a
fabricated tale, but shifts at times suddenly and at times imperceptibly from one into the
other.
U.S. involvement in Vietnam occurred during the final years of World War II. In 1946, Ho Chi
Minh loyalists attacked French military forces and provoked the French into war. The US
supported the French who had been allies in the war. The French began to reassert their
power over Vietnam, but the Chinese and Soviet governments allied themselves with Ho Chi
Minh. The U.S. President Truman sent first, American military advisors to support the
French, and then money because the U.S. feared the growth of Communism throughout the
Pacific. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy continued aid to the French and slowly the
U.S. had 20,000 military personnel in Vietnam. When two U.S. destroyers were fired on by
the North Vietnamese, President Johnson ordered an aerial assault of North Vietnam.
Though U.S. Presidents are given the authority to declare war, none ever did declare war on
the North Vietnamese, and in fact, war was never declared.
O’Brien was sent to Vietnam as an infantryman; he spent his tour of duty in Juan Kni
province and was stationed in My Lai one year after the My Lai massacre of over 300
apparently unarmed Vietnamese civilians including women, children, and the elderly.
American soldiers were, according to a Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) report (2009),

ordered to enter the village of My Lai firing their weapons, though there had been no report
of opposing fire. Eyewitness reports indicated that several old men were bayoneted, praying
women and children were shot in the back of the head, and at least one girl was raped and
then killed.

The young lieutenant commanding the soldiers, William Calley, was said to have rounded up
a group of the villagers, ordered them into a ditch, and mowed them down in a fury of
machine gun fire. The massacre would outrage an American public already divided about
whether young Americans should be sent to Viet Nam. Lieutenant Calley, a college dropout,
served three years under a relaxed house arrest, after his sentence was commuted from life
imprisonment.
In a 2009 PBS interview, O’Brien explains, when

I arrived in Vietnam roughly a year after the massacre happened […] I was assigned just by
serendipity to a unit battalion that had [to survey] the My Lai area. […] And so [on] a good
portion of my tour, I was walking through these villages where this horrible atrocity occurred
prior to my arrival to Vietnam. And part of our fear for the place […] had to do with the
hostility that you could read on the faces of the people there, even among the little children.
[It] was hostility mixed with fear that you encounter now and then but never in that
concentrated, distilled form that you would see on the faces of four-year-olds and seven-
year-olds who must have heard from their parents about what had happened. And it was
beyond the ordinary.

It was while he was still in Vietnam that O’Brien says he began writing vignettes about his
army experience. With several short story publications under his belt, and one poorly-
received novel, he published Going After Cacciato, a breakthrough book that won the
prestigious National Book Award for 1979 over the popular novel The World According to
Garp. In 1986, O’Brien published a short story for Esquire magazine entitled “The Things
They Carried”; it would become the basis for his 1990 novel by the same title.
The Things They Carried sets literal truth aside, yet offers a clearer, deeper sense of what
fighting in Vietnam was like than do many conventional memoirs. O’Brien offers a deeper
emotional description of a young American fighting in Vietnam.
Inter-referentiality of text and author manifests for the first time in the second chapter of The
Things They Carried, “Love”, which begins when “Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home
in Massachusetts.”
In a talk at Davidson College in 2001, O’Brien likened his writing philosophy to what
happened to him as a child, when he wrote his first book:

at age nine, possibly ten […] I wrote […] “Timmy of the Little League” […]. I remember on the
—my mom and dad, I think, still have this aborted effort—I remember on page ten or so of
this—it was hand-written, in big handwriting, but on page ten or so, uh, the Worthington
[Minnesota, where the real Tim O’Brien grew up] Ben Franklin team won the Worthington,
uh, Little League, you know, championship. And I, in the character of Timmy, got the game-
winning hit. On page twenty or so, the team went up to Minneapolis—St. Paul Little League
championship, where the Worthington Ben Franklin team defeated a team from Edina, this
kind of ritzy-ditzy, rich people’s suburb—you guys would fit in there—a place we really
despised, and again, the game-winning hit was by little Timmy, and at the end of the book,
on page thirty or whatever it was, the team went to Williamsport, Pennsylvania [annual host
of the Little League World Series], where they defeated Taiwan, like, eighty to nothing, and
again, the game-winning hit was mine.

O’Brien called the novel Going After Cacciato his “sort of first successful” book, which he
says “was essentially that of “Timmy of the Little League”, or a book about what a character
named Tim O’Brien could do.” O’Brien writes not just about “the world we live in, but I also
write about the world we ought to live in, and could, which is a world of imagination.”
In “Spin”, the third chapter of The Things They Carried, O’Brien uses the phrase “I
remember” three times to introduce the characters he meets during the war, then he tells his
readers that he is “forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over a long
while. Much of it hard to remember.” The contrast establishes a discourse between what is
remembered and what is difficult to remember. O’Brien is asking his reader to hear what the
war was like, to listen to the behaviour of the characters in his novel, so that his readers
might comprehend the complexities of the war. He is not telling the truth, but is telling the
truth as he wants to remember it. Later, in the same chapter, the protagonist O’Brien tells us
that his daughter wants him to write stories about a pony. The writer Tim O’Brien has no
daughter. Timmerman asks whether the “disparity between personal experience and the
historical facticity of war [is] irresolvable.” O’Brien could answer that “what sticks to memory
often are those odd fragments that have no beginning and no end,” so in order to give the
fragments a beginning and an end, the author imagines what could have happened, and to
help readers comprehend, O’Brien passes the “memory” off as real. As he writes at the end
of “Spin”,

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering
makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those
late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where
you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember
except the story.
It is the following chapter in this fiction, “On the Rainy River”, that is perhaps the most telling
example of inter-referentiality. It begins with the narrator O’Brien taking the reader into his
confidence, saying he will now tell a story no one knows, not his parents, not his siblings, not
even his wife. He is ready, after over twenty years, to write the story, to remember it by
“putting facts down on paper.” He tells how he was drafted in June of 1968, just a month
after he graduated Macalester College, a private institution in eastern Minnesota. The writer
O’Brien, a former Macalester College student body president, had graduated with honours
and been accepted by Harvard on a full scholarship. Protagonist O’Brien states that after he
read his draft notice, his head filled with a “silent howl.” He tells us that he began to think
about driving to Canada in protest of serving his country in the war. Finally, he does, he
drives to Canada to a place on the Rainy River called the Tip-Top Lodge. He meets an
elderly man, the lodge’s caretaker and learns much from him about ethics, responsibility,
and compassion. The following commentary is taken from the keynote address O’Brien gave
to Brown University in April, 1999, nine years after the publication of The Things They
Carried:

I came across a closed-down resort along the river, a place called the Tip-Top Lodge. It
wasn’t really a lodge: it was a sort of—ten yellow cabins along the river. Tourist season was
over by then, so the place was abandoned, but I stopped anyway, thinking, well, I’ll think it
over for one last night before I walk away from my own life and from the world I knew. I went
up to the main building and knocked on the door. A little man came to the door. He was
really a small guy, he was like a foot tall. I mean he was really a tiny little guy. He was
dressed all in, all in brown, you know, the kind of north woods look—brown shirt and brown
pants—brown everything. Uh, for the first time in my life I could actually look down at
somebody [O’Brien is short in stature]—I remember looking down at the guy, and he looking
up at me, and he said, “What do you want?” And I said, “A place to stay.” He introduced
himself to me; his name was Elroy Berdahl. The man is the hero of my life. If, uh, heroes
come—come in small packages, this guy did. He took one look at me and I know that
instantly he knew that here’s a kid in deep trouble. Uh, he was no dummy. He knew there
was a war on, he knew this was the Canadian border, he could see how old I was, he could
see the terror in my eyes, I’m sure. He said, “No problem.” He gave me a key, and walked
me to one of his little cabins, and said to me, “I hope you like fish,” and I said, “Yeah.”
Well, during those six days at the Tip-Top Lodge, what do I tell you? They were as important
as anything that later happened in Vietnam. They were much more traumatic than anything
that happened in Vietnam [where] I was wounded, and I saw death all around me. […] I
remember old Ellroy watching me all the time during these six days—he was a very quiet
guy. As I said, he knew something was wrong, but he was the sort of person who would
never talk about it or ask about it. I mean, he was the kind of guy who, if you were to walk
into a bar with two heads, and old Ellroy’s sitting there, he would talk about everything
except that extra head. He’d talk about the weather, and, you know, and Lutheranism, but
not the extra head. […] I remember one afternoon we were out behind his lodge. He was
showing me how to split wood. And I began sweating—I just couldn’t shut the sweat off; I
just was like a spigot had been turned on inside me, just full of it. One night I vomited at his
table. It wasn’t the fish; it was a spiritual sickness inside of me. I remember lying awake at
night, full of very peculiar hallucinations—I mean, it wasn’t, it wasn’t hallucination, really, but
the kind of thoughts you have when you’re suffering from the flu, or you’re really sick. […]
Well, near the end of my stay on the sixth and last day there, Ellroy did a thing that, in a way,
made me into a writer, as much as, you know, Larry of the Little League. He said to me, uh,
“Let’s get in the boat. We’ll go fishing.” So we got into this, you know, little twelve foot boat of
his, and we went across to the Canadian side, and he stopped the boat, maybe, I don’t
know, fifteen yards or so, from the Canadian, you know, where the wilderness was, and he
tossed his line in and started fishing. I was in the front of the boat, in the bow, and he was in
the back, where the engine was, and I can now feel myself there, bobbing in that slate-gray
water, fifteen yards from Canada. I could see the berries on the bushes and the blackbirds
and stones, my coming future. I could have done it, I could have jumped out of that boat,
started swimming for my life. So time went by; again, old Elroy just said nothing, just let me
bob there. I think he knew what he was doing. He was bringing me face-to-face with it all,
and wanted to kind of be there for me the way God is there for us, you know—not really
present, but sort of over our shoulder somewhere, whatever the stand-in for God might be
for you, like a conscience bearing witness, and just here.
After—not long, a couple of minutes—I started crying. It wasn’t loud, just kind of like the
chest-chokes, when you’re crying, but you’re trying not to, and even then, he said nothing,
not a word. After, what, twenty minutes or so, he reeled his line in, said “Ain’t bitin.” Turned
on the engine, and took me back. Well, after we got back to the Minnesota shore, I knew it
was all over. What I was crying about, you see, was—was not self-pity. I was crying with the
knowledge that I’d be going to Vietnam, that I was essentially a coward, that I couldn’t do the
right thing, I couldn’t go to Canada. Given what I believed, anyway, the right thing would
have been to follow your conscience, and I couldn’t do it. Why, to this day, I’m not sure, I can
speculate it. Some of it had to do with raw embarrassment, a fear of blushing, a fear of some
old farmer in my town saying to another farmer, “Did you hear what the O’Brien kid did? The
sissy went to Canada.” And imagining my mom and dad sitting in the next booth over,
overhearing this, you know, and imagining their eyes colliding and bouncing away, and I was
afraid of embarrassment. Men died in Vietnam, by the way, out of the same fear—you know,
not out of nobility or patriotism; they were just afraid—they charged bunkers and machine
gun nests, just because they would be embarrassed not to, later on, in front of their buddies.
[…] I didn’t see Elroy again. I got up the next morning, and I went to, you know, his little
lodge thing, and I knocked on the door, and he wasn’t there. I could see right way he was
gone, his pickup was gone. I left a little note for him, saying thank you. Uh, I got in my-the
car, and I drove north—or drove south, rather, out of the pine forest, down to the prairies of
Southern Minnesota. Within two weeks I was in the Army, and about four months after that in
Vietnam.

O’Brien then tells his audience that the story is not true.

Or very little of it. It’s invented. No Elroy, no Tip-Top Lodge, I’m trying to think of what else.
I’ve never been to the Rainy River in my life. Uh, not even close to it. I haven’t been within
two hundred miles of the place. No boats. But, although I invented the story, it’s still true,
which is what fiction is all about. Uh, if I were to tell you the literal truth of what happened to
me in the summer of nineteen sixty-eight, all I could tell you was that I played golf, and I
worried about getting drafted.
But that’s a crappy story. Isn’t it? It doesn’t—it doesn’t open any door to what I was feeling in
the summer of nineteen sixty-eight. That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when
the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth. […] And in my own heart, I was certainly on that river,
trying to decide what to do, whether to go to the war or not go to it, say no or say yes. The
story is still true, even though on one level it’s not; it’s made up.

O’Brien refers to a situation that never happened as if it were a memory in order to tell
readers the truth about what being drafted to Vietnam meant to a young American college
graduate with other plans for the future. O’Brien presents the truth as something than can be
referenced by stories, not facts, and the stories strengthen the shared viewpoints of
O’Brien’s readers. O’Brien refers to himself in his fictionalised memoir, and believes that the
only way for his “memories” to be taken seriously is for him to make them up, yet the moral
dilemma, the emotions O’Brien explains are real. When a writer invents a story the reader
can identify with and be a part of, the reader becomes a part of the situation in a way he
would not otherwise. To read O’Brien is to experience what filmmaker Errol Morris called
“the fog of war,” and is the exact experience O’Brien intends to induce in the reader. The
young combat veteran in Vietnam the writer used to be consistently wondered what was real
and what was fabricated in his environment and daily life. His secure idea of what was real,
who was the enemy, whom to trust, shifted rapidly from day to day. How can one replicate
that experience in a reader remote from the conflict in space (safe at home in North America
or Europe) and time (a generation or two later, when the book is in print)? Memoir allows
readers to dismiss the text as anecdotal or unrepresentative, fiction invites readers to
consider the story a fabrication.
For the new experience of this kind of war, which was never declared a war by the U.S.
Government, O’Brien crafted a new approach to telling what happened. The reader’s grasp
of what is real and what is invented is continually undermined in The Things They Carried.
Rather than reading for information or pleasure, the reader is compelled to continually
question what is true and false, what is real or not in the text itself. The reader is induced to
decode a hidden memoir behind the apparent fiction, thereby becoming more intellectually
and emotionally invested in the narrative. The reader identifies deeply with the protagonist
because he appears to be the writer himself, and then feels disappointed, even betrayed, by
the writer when he reveals that he has invented large parts of what he remembers. The
sense of camaraderie, and betrayal (by the U.S. Government) in Vietnam a soldier
experienced is replicated to some extent in the reader through his or her experience of
deducing what is factual or fanciful in the text. O’Brien writes in the book that “in any war
story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to
happen.” A “surreal seemingness” makes the story a lie, but the lie tells the “hard and exact
truth as it seemed.”
In the novel’s last chapter “The Lives of the Dead”, O’Brien writes about the death of a
childhood friend, 10-year-old Lorna Lou Moeller who becomes the child Linda in the
chapter/story “The Lives of the Dead”. O’Brien writes that he wants to bring Linda back to
life, but Linda tells him that being dead doesn’t matter. The Kiowa Indian and environmental
lawyer Les Ramirez, who is still living, becomes the character Kiowa, who dies after
drowning in a field of human excrement. English professor and critic Marilyn Wesley reminds
us that “moral evaluation” is essential to the American understanding of our part in the
destruction of Viet Nam—we need to see ourselves as a righteous people who gave “them”
what they deserved. To O’Brien, the telling and retelling of what happened in Viet Nam is a
search for the truth, and not just the truth of events but of accountability, his own and that of
America.
Finally, Tim O’Brien seems to have been performing in his public life as a reader and
speaker some of the same qualities of his eponymous narrator in The Things They Carried.
A careful reading of several of his talks and interviews finds him revising his own biography,
or declaring parts of his work once thought autobiographical to have been wholly imaginary.
One may suspect that O’Brien the writer grows weary of discussing the same book year after
year. However, intentionally or not, O’Brien may be inviting us to radically reconceive the
relationship between the life and the work of a writer. O’Brien seems to be telling us, in his
“work of fiction” and in his public performance as a Famous Author, that the pursuit of some
biographical but ultimately trivial truth in stories of war is far less important than
understanding whether the stories as they are given help us live our own solitary story with
greater depth and dignity.

Originally published in Explicator, vol.

61, no. 3, Spring 2003, p. 189.
 THE DE-TOTALIZATION OF HISTORY IN

TIM O’BRIEN’S THE THINGS THEY CARRIED (1990)

Giséle Manganelli Fernandes

UNESP/SJRP

Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased,

when there is nothing to remember, except the story
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

This paper aims at discussing how Tim O’Brien, a

veteran of the Vietnam
War, reviews the American involvement in the conflict in his novel The
Things They Carried (1990). The author shows the perspective of the
soldiers in the stories and, therefore, presents other possibilities to analyze
that historical fact. The interplay of fiction and truth is essential for O’Brien
to reach the objective of reevaluating official history in order to make the
readers rethink the past.

Keywords: Tim O’Brien; Vietnam War; truth; fiction;

Postmodernism.

The Vietnam War has been the subject of many books,

films,
documentaries, which attempt to find the reasons why American troops
took part in the armed fighting and the outcome of this action. Thus,
Ilha do Desterro

Florianópolis

no 59

p. 013-024

jul./dez. 2010
 Giséle Manganelli Fernandes

different forms of art are helpful in the process of trying

to depict diverse
views of the past.

“I think fiction rescues history from its confusions,”

states the
American writer Don DeLillo (In DePietro, 2005, p.64). Undoubtedly,
postmodern fiction has contributed to this task by presenting multiple
perspectives to approach historical occurrences in order to reevaluate
them. Moreover, according to Linda Hutcheon (1993), postmodern
fiction challenges the notion of “totalization,” showing that there is no
closure to the analysis of a certain fact, only problematization. Her
concept of “historiographic metafiction” is important to examine novels
that reevaluate history and also to address the act of writing itself. The
novelist goes back to the archives (“composed of texts,” and therefore,
“open to all kinds of use and abuse” [Hutcheon, 1993, p.80]), to contest
their discourses, to write other representations of the once unquestioned
version of official history (the ‘Total history’ [is] de-totalized [Hutcheon,
1993, p.62]), leaving the readers free to elaborate their own ideas about
a historical moment. Brian McHale points out that “In postmodernist
revisionist historical fiction, history and fiction exchange places, history
becoming fictional and fiction becoming “true” history—and the real
world seems to get lost in the shuffle. But of course this is precisely the
question postmodernist fiction is designed to raise: real, compared to
what?”(1987, p.96) How can people really say that what they know
about the past is true?

Hutcheon inquires “Which ‘facts’ make it into history?

And whose
facts?”(p.71), toshowthatinsteadofgettingtoknowonlythehistory
of the winners, “we now get the histories (in the plural) of the losers as
well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist,
of the unsung as well as the much sung few, and I might add, of women
as well as man” (p.66). Thus, postmodernism has given the formerly
silenced ones the opportunity of being heard, and this is what the
American writer Tim O’Brien, a veteran of the Vietnam war, does in his
novel The Things They Carried (1990), since the point of view of the
soldiers is privileged in the series of short stories that form the book.
 The de-totalization of history in... 15

The narrator O’Brien, either the author himself or a

narrator created
to tell the story, states that he was against the war, but was drafted and
the only possibility that he could see of not going to Vietnam would be
to flee to Canada. However, he is totally unsure of what to do, since he
knows that it could mean a great shame to him and his family, for he
was born in a small town in which people were conservative. In his
thoughts, he had arguments with his townspeople. He hated their
“simpleminded patriotism” (1998, p.45). He was astonished and felt
repugnance at their lack of historical knowledge and alienation.
However, O’Brien was not brave enough to face them, what they would
say about him if he had chosen not to go (“the damned sissy had taken
off for Canada” [p.45]). But is it bravery to fight a war that you think is
wrong just because you received a draft card?

The author shows that in Vietnam the soldiers did not

only carry
the necessary equipment according to the mission (“What they carried
varied by mission” [p.9]), but also “all the emotional baggage of men
who might die” (p.21). Furthermore, it was important to maintain their
reputations: “They died so as not to die of embarrassment” (p.21). It
would be very difficult to face dishonor, so they tolerated the rough and
strenuous path.

Led by First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the Alpha

Company was in
a mission to find and destroy tunnels built by the Viet Congs, and the
soldiers worried about a variety of issues: “If you screamed, how far
would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have
the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though not many, the
waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer”
(p.11). Through this passage, the reader notices that the young men
were simply subjected to dangerous situations for which they did not
have enough experience and, this way, their imagination tortured them
tremendously.
 Actually, Lieutenant Cross, who carried letters and
photos of his
beloved Martha, had never wanted “the responsibility of leading” those
soldiers (p.167); “he had no desire to command” (p.168), and always felt

Giséle Manganelli Fernandes

guilty for the deaths of his men. During this mission to

search for tunnels
and make them useless, one of the soldiers, Ted Lavender, was “shot
dead in the head on his way back from peeing” (p.12). Kiowa, another
soldier, described the scene as “—just boom, then down—not like the
movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes
ass over teakettle—not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-
fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else”(p.6). Lieutenant Cross felt guilty
for Lavender’s death, because he could not stop thinking about Martha.
Afterthecorpsewastakenaway,theAlphaCompanyburnedeverything
they found in the village of Than Khe (“They shot chickens and dogs”
[p.16]). The account of what happened to Ted Lavender destroys any
illusion presented in war movies. Death is simply “boom, down,” there
is nothing like the movies in which there are “fancy spins.” On the ground
there are no special effects; actually, there is just a subtle line separating
life and death. A soldier is alive at one moment, and, suddenly, is dead.
What is left for the others is to feel the anguish, laugh, and move ahead,
carrying Vietnam (“the place, the soil”[p.15]). The soldiers were the ones
who had to endure, who carried all the scars and the suffering. Their
revenge was to set fire to Than Khe. But the question still stands: for
what? After many years the war was over, Jimmy Cross told O’Brien that
“he’d never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death” (p. 27).

The narrator is forty-three years old and he still

remembers his
friends of the platoon, whose average age “was nineteen or twenty”
(p.37); he thought of what they did, of what they said. Even though his
daughter tells him to write another kind of story, he cannot do it. He
wants to tell the stories about the war, as if they were going to save
other people by preventing the same thing from happening again.
 The importance of his telling stories is to make readers
understand
that the soldiers were young and did not know the place where they
were fighting. Moreover, the Company did not have a clear objective:

They marched for the sake of the march.[...] They had

no
sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages

The de-totalization of history in... 17

without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking

over
jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels,
sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up
and moving on to the next village, then to other villages,
where it would always be the same. (p.15)

The absence of strategy caused many deaths. When

Ted Lavender
died, Lieutenant Cross “felt shame” and “hated himself” (p.16).
Therefore, the inexperience of the soldiers added to confused military
operations led to disastrous results.

O’Brien narrates the deaths of other two soldiers,

Kiowa and Curt
Lemon.

One way of narrating Kiowa’s death in a shit field is

through a
story of an imagined conversation that Norman Bowker, then a veteran,
would have had with his father, who “was at home watching baseball
on national TV,” Sally, whose picture Norman used to carry in his wallet,
but she had gotten married, and Max, a friend “who was drowned”
(p.139). Bowker’s father wanted him to win medals and he did, seven
of them. He would tell his father and friends about the medal he did not
win. Norman would explain that Kiowa died when the boys of the
platoon were at the Song Tra Bong river and it was raining very heavily.
There was the river and the bad smell. So they realized that they “were
camped in a goddamn shit field” (p.148). He heard Kiowa screaming,
“but when he got there Kiowa was almost completely under. [...] He
pulled hard but Kiowa was gone” [...] (p.149). Norman could have
talked about the war to the people in his town, but they would not listen
to him. Just like the people who lived in O’ Brien’s town, war stories did
not matter. Norman’s town “had no memory, therefore no guilt. [...] It
did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know” (p.143). It was
hard for Norman Bowker to find meaning for his like again after the
war. He wrote a letter to O’ Brien asking him to write about his
meaningless life in his town (he ends up hanging himself) and also
about Kiowa’s death. At this point, there is the insertion of parts of the

Giséle Manganelli Fernandes

letter in the narrative to give verisimilitude to the text,

but at the same
time, this shows the readers that these are only discourses, which are
open for reinterpretations. At the end of the story called “Notes,” O’Brien
admitted that “Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what
happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that
night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of
the story is my own” (p.161). The readers are left without knowing if
any part of the story really happened.

At another point in the narrative, O’Brien focuses again

on the
anxieties Lieutenant Cross felt, this time due to Kiowa’s death. Actually,
Cross was “unprepared” (p.168) to lead the group, even after he had
been in Vietnam for several months, since he did not know how “to
keep his men out of a shit field” (p.168). He was going to write a letter
to Kiowa’s father admitting his fault, explaining that the Song Tra Bong
had overflowed its banks and the problem with the mortar fire that
exploded the field. It was “a stupid mistake” that “had killed Kiowa”
(p.168). This is one of the ways O’Brien is able to show the everlasting
pain carried by war veterans.
 The wrongfulness of the war led people to the streets in
order to
protest against the American interference to avoid the so-called and
feared “domino effect.” According to Robert N. Bellah “Vietnam was
very much part of cold war strategy, justified by the famous domino
theory, namely that if South Vietnam fell, all of Southeast Asia would
follow” (In Hauerwas & Lentricchia, 2003, p.15). The effects of the
Vietnam War to the United States were extremely serious and the
country still fears that someday a “new Vietnam” may happen. Bellah
points out that:

Our involvement in the war, which began gradually in

1964-
65 and ended ignominiously in 1975, had by 1969 required
540,000 American troops on the ground. Over the course of
the war we sustained more than 50,000 dead, and the
Vietnamese well over a million. In addition to indiscriminate

The de-totalization of history in... 19

bombing and the killing of civilians in ground warfare,

we
engaged in widespread chemical warfare (Agent Orange),
the effects of which are still being suffered by some Vietnam
veterans in this country, as well as many in Vietnam.
Devastating though the war was for the Vietnamese, the
consequences for American society, from which, wishful
thinking to the contrary, we are still suffering, were
extraordinary, making in many ways an important social and
political turning point. (In Hauerwas & Lentricchia, p.16)

Norman Mailer, in the book The Armies of the Night

(1968),
approaches one of those demonstrations, the protest which occurred in
Washington D.C, on October 21, 1967. The demonstrators faced the
soldiers and tried to hold a conversation with them, as it is shown in the
following passage: “‘Hey, soldier, you think I’m a freak. Why am I
against the war in Vietnam? Cause it’s wrong. You’re not defending
America against Communism, you’re just giving your officers a job”
(1994, p.259). The U.S. would withdraw the troops years after this protest
and, till then, many lives of young Americans were to be lost without
any reason. O’Brien opposed the Vietnam War fiercely, because he
thought it was a wrong war. He explains that it was possible for him to
understand a war to fight “a Hitler or some comparable evil” (p.44), but
not a war without a strictly defined objective.

He could not see himself performing actions such as

“charging an
enemy position, taking aim at another human being” (p.44). The idea
of killing a person who is your enemy only according to official reports,
is not the kind of action that made him feel like a hero of his country.

O’Brien gives an account of the day in the ambush site

when he
threw the grenade at the feet of “a short, slender man of about twenty”
(p.131), who was killed. The narrator creates a story for the dead man,
describing him as someone who “was not a fighter” and “hoped that
the Americans would go away. Soon, he hoped” (p.125). In reality, these
were O’Brien’s wishes transferred to that man. When his daughter
Kathleen asked him if he had killed anyone, he said “ Of course not’”

Giséle Manganelli Fernandes

(p.130), but even though the war was over he had not
sorted it out yet
(p.134). He “did not see the man as the enemy” (p.132). He remembers
the grenade, the moments when “the young man dropped his weapon
and began to run” (p.133), and Kiowa trying to convince him that it was
the right thing to do, after all that “was a war” (p.133). However, “The
words seemed far too complicated,” (p.134) and were not sufficient to
make him change his mind. The narrator states that “Sometimes I
forgive myself, other times I don’t” (p.134). He still thinks of the man,
walking toward him, and, in O’Brien’s thoughts, the man would pass
away from the narrator, smile and “then continue up the trail to where
it bends into the fog” (p.134). He would disappear the same way he
had came into sight as “part of the morning fog,” or of O’Brien’s “own
imagination” (p.132).

One of the strongest issues in the narrative is the

interplay between
truth and fiction. Later in the book, the narrator states that

[...] I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My

Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my
presence was guilt enough. [...]

But listen. Even that story is made up.

I want you to fell what I felt. I want you to know why

story-
truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. (p.179).

O’Brien explains the two notions: the “happening-truth”

is that he
was a soldier and there were bodies; the “story-truth” is that here was
a dead soldier and he had killed the man. He adds that stories “can
make things present” (p.180). O’Brien needs to tell stories in order to
make himself fell as if he were in the battlefield again. And he can say
to his daughter “honestly” that he had killed or had not killed anyone
(p.180), that is, it does not matter whether he had actually caused the
death of that specific man, but since American soldiers were responsible
for the deaths of many people in Vietnam, and he was there, he feels
guilty too. His presence in Vietnam was enough. Hence, not only his

The de-totalization of history in... 21

action is on focus, but also the complete involvement of

U.S. troops in
that war, which left sad, immutable and unending consequences.

Friendship may have different meanings during a war.

In the
story “Friends,” O’Brien describes the pact that Dave Jensen and Lee
Strunk, who had learned “to trust each other” (p.65), had made.
According to their agreement established in late August, if one of them
had an incident and had to be in a wheelchair forever, the other would
have to “find an end to it”(p.65). They signed a paper and had witnesses.
In October, Strunk stepped on a mortar round and lost a leg. After he
realized what had happened, he implored Jensen not to kill him, saying
that his leg could be sewn back. Strunk made Jensen swear that he
would not kill him. Later they “heard that Strunk had died somewhere
over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous
weight” (p.66). This episode shows that although they had that pact, it
would be hard for one to kill the other in any circumstances. Jensen was
probably terrified at the thought that, in the future, Strunk could ask
him to put an end to the suffering Strunk was going through. But would
Jensen have the courage to kill his friend? Friendship, in this case, can
lead to mixed feelings, which are difficult to be managed and
understood.

Another death addressed by the narrator is Curt

Lemon’s in the
story called “How to Tell a True War Story.” Lemon died in a very stupid
way, when he and Rat Kiley were goofing with smoke grenades. After
Lemon’s death, Rat, in an insane act, kills a “baby VC water buffalo”
(p.78) and then cries. The text shows the inexplicable violence towards
the baby buffalo, seen as a Vietcong (VC). The war had made the
soldiers mentally ill. They did not know the difference between the
good guys and the bad guys. In this story, there is a profound discussion
related to the question of truth. The story begins with the statement
“This is true” (p.67), it goes to “it’s all exactly true” (p.70), then to “it is
difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen”
(p.71), “The truths are contradictory” (p.80), “Almost everything is true.
Almostnothingistrue”(p.81).Andfinally,“[Link]

Giséle Manganelli Fernandes

of it” (p.85). But, anyway, it is necessary to tell stories,

to understand
what happened or even what could have happened.
 In the story “The Lives of the Dead”, he recalls the
deaths of Linda,
his childhood sweetheart, Ted Lavender, Kiowa, Curt Lemon, the young
man he might have killed. Linda was nine years old and died as a
result of brain tumor. However, by telling a story, she can be close to
him again and say “‘Timmy, stop crying’” (p.236).

According to Maria Bonn:

In Vietnam, O’Brien tells us, “we kept the dead alive

with
stories” (207). “The Lives of the Dead,” the novel’s final story
contains O’Brien most definitive articulation of the
relationship between memory and story. O’Brien recalls the
death of his childhood sweetheart and how night after night
he would invent dreams to bring her back. (1994, p.14)

The narrator addresses “the worst day of the war,”

which was the
occasion when O’Brien and Mitchell Sanders had to carry the heavy
bodies of some enemy soldiers who were killed in action (KIA) and
toss them into a truck. After some time, Sanders sums up his thoughts
towards the whole situation, by saying that “Death sucks” (p.243).

Writing/telling stories is the way the author found to

bring back
the past. He can see and listen to his friends again. Rodrigo Paula
points out that O’Brien successfully uses his stories not only “to
reevaluate the post-war impact on American youth” (2007, p.7), as
shown through Norman’s situation, but also to “immortalize those
who had died” [...] and “keep the past alive and open so that people
can rethink it” (p.8 - my translation). Thus, he can have a significant
reason for his life and become free from that undefined, nebulous
past, since he is trying to make it present and find answers to questions
that still need to be clarified.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book The Age of

Extremes
(1994), states that

The de-totalization of history in... 23

 The Vietnam War demoralized and divided the nation
[the
U.S.A.], amid televised scenes of riots and anti-war
demonstrations; destroyed an American president; led to a
universally predicted defeat and retreat after ten yeas (1965-
75); and, what was even more to the point, demonstrated the
isolation of the U.S.A. For not a single one of America’s European
allies sent even nominal contingents of troops to fight alongside
the U.S. forces. Why the U.S. came to embroil itself in a doomed
war, against which both its allied, neutrals, and even the U.S.S.R.
had warned it, is almost impossible to understand, except as part
of that dense cloud of incomprehension, confusion and paranoia
through which the main actors in the Cold War tapped their way.
(1996, p.244-245).

It is possible to conclude that whether O’Brien’s stories

are true or
not is not the central issue. O ́Brien, in his work of fiction, aims at showing
several possibilities to de-totalize “total History”. The remarkable aspect
of his writing is to show that “Stories are for joining the past to the
future” (p.38) and when remembering leads to a story, it will last forever.
The author proves the power of literature to construct and reconstruct
the historical past.

References