Dissection of Tim O’Brien’s Prime Narrative Against Herzog’s Fifth Hypothesis

Dissection of Tim O’Brien’s Prime Narrative Against Herzog’s Fifth Hypothesis

In one of the most influential pieces of postmodern literature, Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried introduces us to a war fact/fiction writing where two of these themes intermingle into each other to such degree that nothing remains clear in the end but the emotional communication that attempts to convey the horrors of the Vietnam War. This writing style has distinguished Tim O’Brien from many other authors that wrote in the same genre and conveyed their respective style. In The Things They carried, the treatment of the Vietnam War is very precise, in the meaning of the nature of the war itself. It is a collection of short stories that contain near-fictional characters accounting their experiences in the Vietnam War. This near-fiction becomes troubling for the readers of Tim O’Brien. The readers listen to the author telling them stories about his experiences about the war differently, on many occasions through interviews, real life and then the narratives in The Things They Carried which also adds to the ambiguity of the prime narrative of the author that is near-fiction or near-fact. Tobey C. Herzog analyzes this prime narrative in his paper “Tim O’Brien “True Lies”” and presents us with eight hypothesis that may explain the behavior of the author and his prime narrative of story-truths. This paper will attempt to analyze one of the eight hypothesis and try to judge its worth for explaining the prime narrative of “True Lies” that are relevant in the life and works of Tim O’Brien.

For this paper, the fifth hypothesis is chosen to show that it actually contains the whole Tim O’Brien as the person, soldier, character and author of his works. The U...

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...h hypothesis is quite central in the working of Tim O’Brien and that transformed into the other set of binary of person and soldier in life against the binary of author and character of stories of Tim O’Brien. His gamesmanship towards which Herzog constantly refers is the product of this theme and as Herzog maintains in his fifth hypothesis that the author rejects the idea of closure in the acute experience of uncertainty is also apparent in his life when he provides many contradictory statements and plays with the readers mind to dislocate them (Herzog). It can be said that Tim O’Brien wants the reader to experience, to a certain degree, the senselessness, meaninglessness and the absence of any rooting substance that he had experienced in the war through his writing. In this way the fifth hypothesis is closest to contain most of the life and works of Tim O’Brien.