How to Tell a True War Story' Metafiction in The Things They
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Title: 'How to Tell a True War Story':
Metafiction in The Things They Carried
Author(s): Catherine Calloway
Publication
Details: Critique 36.4 (Summer 1995): p249-257.
Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.
Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 211. Detroit: Gale, 2006.
From Literature Resource Center.
Document
Type: Critical essay
Full Text: COPYRIGHT
2006 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Full Text:
[(essay date summer 1995) In
the following essay, Calloway provides a stylistic
analysis of The
Things They Carried, regarding
the volume as a work of contemporary metafiction.]
Tim O'Brien's most recent book, The
Things They Carried, begins with a litany of items
that the
soldiers in the Vietnam War--assorted
weapons, dog tags, flak jackets, ear plugs,
cigarettes, insect repellent, letters, can
openers, C-rations, jungle boots, maps, medical
supplies,
and explosives as well as memories,
reputations, and personal histories. In addition,
the reader
soon learns, the soldiers also
carry stories: stories that connect past to the
future(40),
stories that can
are
and
bedlam, the mad and the mundane
They Carried
are as brief as the well-known Vietnam War tale
related by Michael Herr in
Dispatches--
what happened,'are in their
own way as enigmatic. The tales included in
O'Brien's
twenty-two chapters range from
several lines to many pages and demonstrate well
the
impossibility of knowing the reality of
the war in absolute terms. Sometimes stories are
abandoned, only to be continued pages or
chapters later. At other times, the narrator
begins to
tell a story, only to have another
character finish the tale. Still other stories are
told as if true
accounts, only for their
validity to be immediately questioned or denied.
O'Brien draws the
reader into the text,
calling the reader's attention to the process of
invention and challenging him
to determine
which, if any, of the stories are true. As a
result, the stories become epistemological
tools, multidimensional windows through which
the war, the world, and the ways of telling a war
story can be viewed from many different angles
and visions.
The epistemological
ambivalence of the stories in The Things They
Carried is reinforced by the
book's ambiguity
of style and structure. What exactly is The Things
They Carried in terms of
technique? Many
reviewers refer to the work as a series of short
stories, but it is much more than
that. The
Things They Carried is a combat novel, yet it is
not a combat novel. It is also a blend of
traditional and untraditional forms--a
collection, Gene Lyons says, of stories, essays,
anecdotes, narrative fragments, jokes, fables,
biographical and autobiographical sketches, and
philosophical asides
perfectly on their
own
Also ambiguous is the issue of how
much of the book is autobiography. The
relationship between
fiction and reality
arises early in the text when the reader learns
the first of many parallels that
emerge
as the book progresses: that the protagonist and
narrator, like the real author of The
Things
They Carried, is named Tim O'Brien. Both the real
and the fictional Tim O'Brien are in their
forties and are natives of Minnesota, writers
who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Macalester
College, served as grunts in Vietnam after
having been drafted at age twenty-one, attended
graduate school at Harvard University, and
wrote books entitled If I Die in a Combat Zone and
Going After Cacciato. Other events of the
protagonist's life are apparently invention.
Unlike the
real Tim O'Brien, the protagonist
has a nine-year-old daughter named Kathleen and
makes a
return journey to Vietnam years after
the war is over.1 However, even the other
supposedly
fictional characters of the book
sound real because of an epigraph preceding the
stories that
states,
Cross, Norman Bowker,
Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and
Kiowa,leading the
reader to wonder if the men
of Alpha Company are real or imaginary.
Clearly O'Brien resists a simplistic
classification of his latest work. In both the
preface to the book
and in an interview with
Elizabeth Mehren, he terms The Things They Carried
(Mehren E1), but in an interview with Martin
Naparsteck, he refers to the work as a
novel,
half group of stories. It's part nonfiction,
too,
the work
journalism; it is, more
significantly, all at the same time
As
O'Brien's extensive focus on storytelling
indicates, The Things They Carried is also a work
of
contemporary metafiction, what Robert
Scholes first termed fabulation or controlled
fantasy
Metafiction is a term given to
fictional writing which self-consciously and
systematically draws
attention to its status
as an artefact in order to pose questions about
the relationship between
fiction and reality.
In providing a critique of their own methods of
construction, such writings not
only examine
the fundamental structures of narrative fiction,
they also explore the possible
fictionality of
the world outside the literary fictional text.(2)
Like O'Brien's earlier novel, the critically
acclaimed Going After Cacciato,2 The Things They
Carried considers the process of writing; it
is, in fact, as much about the process of writing
as it is
the text of a literary work. By
examining imagination and memory, two main
components that
O'Brien feels are important to
a writer of fiction (Schroeder 143), and by
providing so many layers
of technique in one
work, O'Brien delves into the origins of fictional
creation. In focusing so
extensively on what a
war story is or is not, O'Brien writes a war story
as he examines the process
of writing one. To
echo what Philip Beidler has stated about Going
After Cacciato,
The Things They Carried thus
becomes
the book, directly referring
to his role as author and to the status of his
work as artifice.
it [the war] is hard to
remember,
words and watch Kiowa sinking into
the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon
hanging in
pieces from a tree, and as I write
about these things, the remembering is turned into
a kind of
rehappening(36). The takes the form
of a number of types of stories: some
happy, some sad, some peaceful, some
bloody, some wacky. We learn of Ted Lavender, who
is
Strunk, of the revenge plot against
Bobby Jorgenson, an unskilled medic who almost
accidentally
kills the narrator, of the moral
confusion of the protagonist who fishes on the
Rainy River and
dreams of desertion to Canada,
and Mary Ann Bell, Mark Fossie's blue-eyed,
blonde,
seventeen-year-old girlfriend, who is
chillingly attracted to life in a combat zone.
Some stories only indirectly reflect the
process of writing; other selections include
obvious
metafictional devices. In certain
sections of the book, entire chapters are devoted
to discussing
form and technique. A good
example is
story that precedes it. The serious
reader of the real Tim O'Brien's fiction
recognizes
Courageas having first been
published in the Summer 1976 issue of
Massachusetts Review.3
This earlier version of
the story plays off chapter 14 of Going After
Cacciato, Almost
Winning the Silver Star,in
which the protagonist, Paul Berlin, is thinking
about how he might
have won the Silver Star
for bravery in Vietnam had he had the courage to
rescue Frenchie Tucker,
a character shot while
searching a tunnel. However, in The Things They
Carried's version of
Paul Berlin, but Norman
Bowker, who wishes he
had had the courage to
save Kiowa, a soldier who dies in a field of
excrement during a mortar
attack.4 Such shifts
in character and events tempt the reader into
textual participation, leading
him to question
the ambiguous nature of reality. Who really did
not win the Silver Star for
bravery? Paul
Berlin, Norman Bowker, or Tim O'Brien? Who
actually needed saving? Frenchie
Tucker or
Kiowa? Which version of the story, if either, is
accurate? The inclusion of a metafictional
chapter presenting the background behind the
tale provides no definite answers or resolutions.
We learn that Norman Bowker, who eventually
commits suicide, asks the narrator to compose
the story and that the author has revised the
tale for inclusion in The Things They Carried
because a postwar story is more appropriate
for the later book than for Going After Cacciato.
However, O'Brien's admission that much of the
story is still invention compels the reader to
wonder about the truth. The narrator assures
us that the truth is that did not
experience a
failure of nerve that night ... or lose the Silver
Star for valor
version be believed? Was there
really a Norman Bowker, or is he, too, only
fictional?
Even more significant, the
reader is led to question the reality of many, if
not all, of the stories in
the book. The
narrator insists that the story of Curt Lemon's
death, for instance, is
true(77), then states
eight pages later that he has told Curt's story
previously--times,
many versions
incident
are questionable. Similarly, the reader is led to
doubt the validity of many of the tales
told
by other characters in the book. The narrator
remarks that Rat Kiley's stories, such as the
one about Mary Ann Bell in
For Rat
Kiley ... facts were formed by sensation, not the
other way around, and when you listened
to one
of his stories, you'd find yourself performing
rapid calculations in your head, subtracting
superlatives, figuring the square root of an
absolute and then multiplying by maybe.(101)
Still other characters admit the fictionality
of their stories. Mitchell Sanders, in the
ironically titled
parts of it are
pure invention. night, man,'Sanders states, had to
make up a few
things ... The glee club. There
wasn't any glee club ... No opera,'
O'Brien shares the criteria with which the
writer or teller and the reader or listener must
be
concerned by giving an extended definition
of what a war story is or is not. The chapter
Tell a True War Story
war tale. true war
story is never moral,the narrator states. does not
instruct, nor
encourage virtue, nor suggest
models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men
from doing
the things men have always
done(76). Furthermore, a true war story has an and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and
evil
seems to go on forever, does
not
necessarily make
reader soon realizes, are
like the nature of the Vietnam War itself; only
certainty is
overwhelming ambiguity
By defining a war story so broadly, O'Brien
writes more stories, interspersing the definitions
with
examples from the war to illustrate them.
What is particularly significant about the
examples is
that they are given in segments, a
technique that actively engages the readers in the
process of
textual creation. Characters who
are mentioned as having died early in the work are
brought back
to life through flashbacks in
other parts of the text so that we can see who
these characters are,
what they are like, and
how they die. For instance, in the story,
the
death of Curt Lemon, a soldier blown apart by a
booby trap, but the reader does not learn
the
details of the tragedy until four stories later in
reader must piece together the details of
Curt's death throughout that particular tale. The
first
reference to Lemon appears on the third
page of the story when O'Brien matter-of-factly
states,
dead guy's name was Curt Lemon(77).
Lemon's death is briefly mentioned a few
paragraphs later, but additional details
surrounding the incident are not given at once but
are
revealed gradually throughout the story,
in between digressive stories narrated by two
other
soldiers, Rat Kiley and Mitchell
Sanders. Each fragment about Curt's accident
illustrates the
situation more graphically.
Near the beginning of the tale, O'Brien describes
the death somewhat
poetically. Curt is
he
died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight
came around him and lifted him up and
sucked
him high into a tree full of moss and vines and
white blossoms(78). Lemon is not
mentioned
again for seven pages, at which time O'Brien
illustrates the effect of Lemon's death
upon
the other soldiers by detailing how Rat Kiley,
avenging Curt's death, mutilates and kills a
baby water buffalo. When later in the story
Lemon's accident is narrated for the third time,
the
reader is finally told what was briefly
alluded to in the earlier tale
peel Curt
Lemon's body parts from a tree.
The story
of Curt Lemon does not end with
in two other
stories,
example, Curt is resurrected through
a story of his trick-or-treating in Vietnamese
hootches on
Halloween for whatever
goodies he can get:
and statuettes of the
smiling Buddha(268). To hear Rat Kiley tell it,
the narrator comments,
never know that Curt
Lemon was dead. He was still out there in the
dark, naked and
painted up, trick-or-treating,
sliding from hootch to hootch in that crazy white
ghost mask
To further complicate matters, in
Curt, Stink Harris, from a previous literary
work, Going After Cacciato, written over a decade
before The Things They Carried. Thus, the
epistemological uncertainty in the stories is
mirrored
by the fact that O'Brien presents
events that take place in a fragmented form rather
than in a
straightforward, linear fashion. The
reader has to piece together information, such as
the
circumstances surrounding the characters'
deaths, in the same manner that the characters
must
piece together the reality of the war,
or, for that matter, Curt Lemon's body.
The issue of truth is particularly a main crux
of the events surrounding
that O'Brien places
near the center of the book. Gradually
interspersed throughout the stories
that make
up The Things They Carried are references to a
Vietnamese soldier, slim, dead,
dainty young
man of about twenty
mentioned in the story
war. Nine chapters after
dead Vietnamese
youth as well as creates a personal history for
him; he envisions the young man
to have been a
reluctant soldier who hated violence and
mathematics(142), a
university-educated man
who
narrator, perhaps went to war only to
avoid himself, and therefore his family and
village(142).5 the story immediately following
Man I Killed,provides yet
another
kaleidoscopic fictional frame of the incident,
describing in detail the events that lead up
to the narrator's killing of the young soldier
and ending with a version of the event that
suggests
that the young man does not die at
all. The reader is forced to connect the threads
of the story in
between several chapters that
span over a hundred pages; not until a later
chapter,
where the protagonist narrates three
more stories of the event, does the reader fully
question
the truth of the incident. In the
first version in
the earlier stories and
denies that he was the thrower of the grenade that
killed the man.
kill him. But I was
present, you see, and my presence was guilt
enough(203). However, he
immediately admits
that
happening-truth
I was once a
soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with
real faces, but I was young then
and I was
afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm
left with faceless responsibility and
faceless
grief.(203)
In still a third version,
protagonist, the Vietnamese soldier
was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of
about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay
trail
near the village of My Khe. His jaw was
in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye
was a
star-shaped hole. I killed him.(204)
But the reader wonders, did the
narrator kill the young man? When the narrator's
nine-year-old
daughter demands,
he
According to Inger Christensen, one of the
most important elements of metafiction is
novelist's message
Carried to the moral
thematic concern.
concluding story of the
text (255), where fiction is used as a means of
resurrecting the deceased.
In this multiple
narrative, O'Brien juxtaposes tales of death in
Vietnam with an account of the
death of Linda,
a nine-year-old girl who had a brain tumor. As the
protagonist tells Linda's story,
he also
comments on the nature and power of fiction.
Stories, he writes, are
[where] the dead
sometimes smile and sit up and return to the
world(255). The narrator of
I
want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life
... in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive,
at
least briefly, that which is absolute and
unchanging. ... In a story, miracles can happen.
Linda can
smile and sit up. She can reach out,
touch my wrist, and say,
Past, present, and
future merge into one story as through fiction
O'Brien zips
of ... [his] own history, moving
fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing
loops and spins ...
as Tim trying to save
Timmy's life with a story
history,
the war
of a little boy's soul as he tries to understand
the death of a friend, the Vietnam War of a
twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, and
the war of and sorrow(265) faced by
middle-
aged writer
In focusing so extensively on
the power of fiction and on what a war story is or
is not in The
Things They Carried, O'Brien
writes a multidimensional war story even as he
examines the
process of writing one. His tales
become stories within stories or multilayered
texts within texts
within texts. The book's
genius is a seeming inevitability of form that
perfectly embodies its
theme--the miracle of
vision--the eternally protean and volatile
capacity of the imagination,
which may invent
that which it has the will and vision to
conceive.6
states,
a true war story
is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's
about the special way that dawn
spreads out on
a river when you know you must cross the river and
march into the mountains
and do things you are
afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's
about sorrow. It's about
sisters who never
write back and people who never listen.(91)
How, then, can a true war story be told?
Perhaps the best way, O'Brien says, is to
telling it
Notes
1.
Biographical information on the real Tim O'Brien
is taken from published facts of his life. See,
for instance, Michael Coffey,
O'BrienPublishers Weekly, 237, 16 Feb. 1990,
60-61, and
Everett C. Wilkie, Jr.,
Rood,
Jean W. Ross, and Richard Ziegfeld. Detroit: Gale,
1981, 286-290.
2. New York: DeltaSeymour
Lawrence, 1978. Going After Cacciato received the
National Book
Award in 1979.
3. Vol.
17, pp. 243-253. The earlier version of the story
has also been published in Prize Stories
1978:
The O'Henry Awards. Ed. and intro. William
Abrahams. Garden City: Doubleday, 1978.
159-168. A later version of
along with
4. O'Brien frequently makes changes
between versions of his stories that are published
in literary
magazines and chapters of his
books. The version of
issue of The Quarterly
(3-13), for example, combines several of the
individual stories from The
Things They
Carried into one longer tale. In addition, O'Brien
makes changes between the
hardback and
paperback versions of his books. In both the
edition of The Things They Carried and the
short story version of
1990: 78-79), the
narrator returns Kiowa's hatchet to the site of
Kiowa's death, but in the
paperback edition of
The Things They Carried (New York: Penguin, 1990),
the narrator carries a
pair of Kiowa's
moccasins. For references to changes in O'Brien's
earlier works, see my
of Vision: Going After
Cacciato and Tim O'Brien's Short
Fiction,
Essays on Literature and Film of the
Vietnam War. Eds. Owen W. Gilman, Jr. and Lorrie
Smith. New
York: Garland, 1990. 213-224.
5. O'Brien develops the figure of the young
Vietnamese youth who opposes the war more fully in
Going After Cacciato, where Li Van Hgoc, a
Vietnamese major, has been imprisoned in a tunnel
complex for ten years for fleeing from the war
and refusing to fight. The major, in a sense,
mirrors
Paul Berlin and the Third Squad.
Theoretically, the soldiers have one main factor
in common with
Li Van Hgoc; they are all
deserters from the war.
6. This theme is
also a main theme of Going After Cacciato, which
examines issues such as how
war affects the
imagination and how the imagination affects war,
how reality cannot be escaped,
even in the
imagination, how the imagination is used to invent
rather than to discover, how the
imagination
must be used as a responsible tool, and how the
imagination can be a force for
remaking
reality.
Works Cited
Bawer,
Bruce. or Fiction? Stories from Street Journal
215, 23 Mar
1990: A13.
Beidler,
Philip D. American Literature and the Experience
of Vietnam. Athens: U of Georgia P,
1982.
Christensen, Inger. The
Meaning of Metafiction. Bergen:
Universitetsforlaget, 1981.
Herr,
Michael. Dispatches. New York: Vintage, 1977.
Lyons, Gene.
Mehren, Elizabeth.
Melmoth, John,
Naparsteck, Martin.
1-11.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They
Carried. New York: Houghton, 1990.
Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction.
Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1983.
Schroeder,
Eric James. Interviews: Talks With Tim O'Brien and
Robert
Fiction Studies 30 (Spring 1984):
135-64.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The
Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New
York:
Methuen, 1984.
Source Citation
(MLA 7th Edition)
Calloway, Catherine. to Tell
a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They
Carried.
Critique 36.4 (Summer 1995): 249-257.
Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.
Jeffrey W.
Hunter. Vol. 211. Detroit: Gale,
2006. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 10 Mar.
2013.
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