Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, expresses his journey throughout the Vietnam War via a series of short stories. The novel uses storytelling to express the emotional toll the men encountered, as well as elucidate their intense experiences faced during the war. The literary theory, postmodernism, looks at these war experiences and questions their subjectivity, objectivity, and truth in a literary setting. It allows the reader to look through a lens that deepens the meaning of a work by looking past what is written and discovering the various truths. O’Brien used the storytelling process to illustrate the bleeding frame of truth. Through his unique writing style, he articulates the central idea of postmodernism to demonstrate the …show more content…
O’Brien subjectifies truth by obscuring both fact and fiction within his storytelling. In each story he tells there is some fuzziness in what actually happened. There are two types of truths in this novel, “story-truth” and “happening-truth” (173). “Happening-truth” is what happened in the moment and “story-truth” is the way the storyteller reflects and interprets a situation. O’Brien uses these two types of truths to blur out the difference between fact and fiction. For example, when Rat Kiley tells a story he always overexaggerates. He does this because “he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt,” (85). This is the same for most storytellers, even O’Brien. When he tells the story of Norman Bowker he makes his own truth stating, “He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own” (154). Not everything that O’Brien said was fact, however, it made the the meaning of the story effective and significant. O’Brien reveals that he never killed a man after devoting a whole short story to “The Man I Killed.” When his daughter asks “Daddy, tell the truth, did you ever kill anybody?” he can honestly say “Of course not,” or “Yes,” (172). This illustrates the subjectivity of truth, how both truths can in fact be true. This goes for all the stories told in this novel, the truth is held in the storyteller 's …show more content…
This allows the reader to see what takes place rather than what is perceived. O’Brien’s main objective is to expose the subjectivity that lies within truth. To point out a specific contradiction within truth, he uses war to highlight this difference. He writes, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty” (77). The truth has two different meanings and it all depends on who is interpreting it. One person may think one truth and another person can see the complete opposite. To go along with this ambiguity within truth he states, “Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true” (77). He once again shows that truth is up for interpretation. There is not a single, universal truth, however, there are many variations of it. As previously mentioned, O’Brien claims that he honestly admit that he has both never killed a man and has in fact killed somebody. Here he is stating that there can be completely different answers that all seem to be the truthful. Whether or not O’Brien killed someone, he felt like he did, but could answer that he didn’t. It is this discrepancy that proves that it is all relative. When it comes to telling the story it becomes “difficult difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen,” (67). This is what causes the subjectivity, the unknowingness of the situation. Since
In The Things They Carried, an engaging novel of war, author Tim O’Brien shares the unique warfare experience of the Alpha Company, an assembly of American military men that set off to fight for their country in the gruesome Vietnam War. Within the novel, the author O’Brien uses the character Tim O’Brien to narrate and remark on his own experience as well as the experiences of his fellow soldiers in the Alpha Company. Throughout the story, O’Brien gives the reader a raw perspective of the Alpha Company’s military life in Vietnam. He sheds light on both the tangible and intangible things a soldier must bear as he trudges along the battlefield in hope for freedom from war and bloodshed. As the narrator, O’Brien displayed a broad imagination, retentive memory, and detailed descriptions of his past as well as present situations. 5. The author successfully uses rhetoric devices such as imagery, personification, and repetition of O’Brien to provoke deep thought and allow the reader to see and understand the burden of the war through the eyes of Tim O’Brien and his soldiers.
Think that O'Brien is still suffering from what he experienced in Vietnam and he uses his writing to help him deal with his conflicts. In order to deal with war or other traumatic experiences, you sometimes just have to relive the experiences over and over. This is what O'Brien does with his writing; he expresses his emotional truths even if it means he has to change the facts of the literal truth. The literal truth, or some of the things that happen during war, are so horrible that you don't want to believe that it could've actually happened. For instance, "[o]ne colonel wanted the hearts cut out of the dead Vietcong to feed to his dog..
...r because it seems impossible to reconstruct an event from this objective point of view. Maybe the point of telling stories is not trying to recreate the reality of a past event, but it is the message that matters because that might be in the end the only thing that does not necessarily depend on single details of the story, but on the overall picture of an event. That is why to O’Brien another important component of a war story is the fact that a war story will never pin down the definite truth and that is why a true war story “never seems to end” (O’Brien, 425). O’Brien moves the reader from the short and simple statement “This is the truth” to the conclusion that, “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nohting much is ever very true” (O’Brien, 428). These two statements frame the entire irony of the story, from its beginning to its end. Almost like the popular saying “A wise man admits that he knows nothing.”
He implies, “The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real” (Truth and lies, 54). However, this is not the case with O’Brien’s writings. O’Brien mentions that a true war story is in a way that it completely sounds unrealistic, which is one detail that completely conflicts Nietzsche’s thoughts. In his story the “How to tell a true war story”, he says, “A true war story is never moral… embarrassing… unbelievable… contradictory…” (A true war story) According to Nietzsche, O’Brien is telling all lies because his stories appear unreal, and unbelievable. Nevertheless, according to O’Brien, this is the way to tell a true war story, a story that makes you feel uncomfortable, and make you ask whether it is true or not. Sticking to his statements O’Brien thinks that “Speaking of courage” is not a true war story because it sounds realistic. There is nothing embarrassing or unrealistic about that story. O’Brien mentions it in his story “Notes,” that writing “Speaking of courage” felt like a sense of failure. “Almost immediately, though, there was a sense of failure. The details of Norman Bowker 's story were missing. In this original version…I had been forced to omit the shit field and the rain and the death of Kiowa…” (The things they carried, 158) This statement shows, that unless
The novel, “The Things They Carried”, is about the experiences of Tim O’Brian and his fellow platoon members during their time fighting in the Vietnam War. They face much adversity that can only be encountered in the horrors of fighting a war. The men experience death of friends, civilians, enemies and at points loss of their rationale. In turn, the soldiers use a spectrum of methods to cope with the hardships of war, dark humor, daydreaming, and violent actions all allow an escape from the horrors of Vietnam that they experience most days.
One of the later entries in the book called “Good form”, helps alleviate the suspicion of dishonesty in the stories by bluntly telling the reader that all the other entries are a mix of both fact and fiction. O’Brien feels the need to make up parts of his stories due to the fact that he wants the reader to experience emotions as opposed to mental visuals. He describes these emotion-laden scenes as “story-truth” due to the fact that they are part story and part truth. The parts that are only for emotio...
The truth to any war does not lie in the depths of storytelling but rather it’s embedded in every person involved. According to O’Brien, “A true war story does not depend on that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (pg. 80). Truths of any war story in my own opinion cannot be fully conveyed or explained through the use of words. Any and all war stories provide specific or certain facts about war but each of them do not and cannot allow the audience to fully grasp the tru...
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is not a novel about the Vietnam War. “It is a story about the soldiers and their experiences and emotions that are brought about from the war” (King 182). O'Brien makes several statements about war through these dynamic characters. He shows the violent nature of soldiers under the pressures of war, he makes an effective antiwar statement, and he comments on the reversal of a social deviation into the norm. By skillfully employing the stylistic technique of specific, conscious detail selection and utilizing connotative diction, O'Brien thoroughly and convincingly makes each point.
He admits that some parts of his writing are made up, and he is intentionally vague about the truthfulness of other parts. When asked if he had ever killed anyone, O’Brien said that he could reply, honestly, with both “Of course not,” and “Yes” (172). He explains that even the guilt of being present when the kill took place was enough that it doesn’t matter if he himself threw the grenade or not, he would feel the same way. It doesn’t matter the exact events that took place; this story is about how he felt about seeing murder up close and personal. O’Brien explains that “by telling stories, you objectify your own experience... You pin down certain truths. You make up others” (152). Writing was a way to verbalize his past, and he told the vague details how he experienced them, if not necessarily how they happened. He was able to separate himself from his memories and remorse allowing himself to cope with his past in the war. While the reader will never know the exact truth, they can still understand the guilt and that O’Brien felt as a
A story or experience can be told in many different versions, truthfully or not and they’re all equally valid, each carrying its own equal resonating affect. This occurs in the four versions of Curt Lemon’s death; the narrator makes the puzzling statement, “this is true” but continues to provide us with four different occurrences of what “really” happened (O’Brien 65). One of them describes his death as “almost beautiful”, another as “horrible” and we’re never given the actual truth, in fact, the reader questions if there even is one truthful story ...
Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing the character’s psychological burdens.
He wants the readers to be able to feel how he felt and understand how everything happened as he tells the story. He wants to provoke the emotional truth. O’Brien tries to prove that imagination is not completely a bad thing and that it is also a good thing. O’Brien starts to create stories about what could have happened and what he could not do at the war, in addition to the original war story. With the power of imagination, O’Brien is able to talk about something that he could have done but did not do in his past.
In Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, numerous themes are illustrated by the author. Through the portrayal of a number of characters, Tim O’Brien suggests that to adapt to Vietnam is not always more difficult than to revert back to the lives they once knew. Correspondingly the theme of change is omnipresent throughout the novel, specifically in the depiction of numerous characters.
...ien writes this story in a completely non traditional way and manages to create a whole new experience for the reader. He takes the reader out of the common true, false diameters and forces the reader to simply experience the ultimate truth of the story by reliving the emotional truth that the war caused him. Although this may be a bit challenging for the reader, it becomes much easier once the reader understands the purpose for the constant contradictions made by O’Brien. The difference between “story-truth” and “happening-truth” is that “story-truth” is fictional, and “happening-truth” is the actual factual truth of what happened. The “story-truth” is the most important when it comes to O’Brien, and understanding his work. It is meant to capture the heart and mind of the readers and take them on a journey through war with the O’Brien, as he experienced and felt it.
The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.