The Unreliable Narrator as Liar v. Unreliable
Narrator as Guide
Whenever I think of the concept of the “unreliable narrator” in literature, I think of Edgar Allan Poe, and stories of his like the “Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Using Poe’s fiction as a type of manual, my teachers in graduate school taught me how to interrogate a narrator’s credibility; I was taught, in essence, to read against the narrative, to look for signs of contradiction, to chart the extremes of obsession, to diagnose mental illness. The typical Poe narrator strategically and rationally tells his story—at least seemingly, or professedly, so at the start. But in focusing on his “reality,” his guilt, the perfection of his crime, the intensity of his experience, and so on, he pulls us into a monomania that has afflicted him and distorts his vision; his tale blurs the line between sanity and insanity, and leaves its readers with questions, possibilities, and disturbances.
I learned that reading Poe attentively required a double consciousness: reading the story and reading the story behind the story. The teacher in me now sees that Poe’s fiction, in its extremes, provided my teachers a convenient point of entry into the world of literary hermeneutics in general. For Poe, it could be argued, put into bold relief general issues of interpretation that pertain to every narrative. Just what could be trusted of any narrator or author? Once you looked for the signs of “insanity” or “unreliability”—or contradiction—in the more obvious instances of Poe’s fiction, you started to perceive possible doubts and truth issues in all accounts everywhere. Contemporary literary criticism, of course, has jumped off this springboard into a whole realm of interpretive doubt and potentiality about all language and reality. . . .
With the novel, The Things They Carried, the concept of the unreliable narrator comes full circle. The narrator of this novel, “Tim O’Brien,” is definitely “unreliable”—but unlike Poe’s narrators who tried to come across as believable, O’Brien’s narrator deliberately announces the inadequacy of his facts and overall storytelling. Instead of hiding the cracks in his story (or professing sanity and validity like Poe’s narrators), “Tim O’Brien” explicitly focuses on them, and in doing so, he ironically—upon such a foundation—constructs a poignant set of truths—both about the significance of his lived experience and about something far larger: the nature of storytelling, truth, memory, and imagination in general.
The Things They Carried: Whose Story?
What Truth?
In this novel, Tim O’Brien (author? narrator? both?) speaks of his experiences during, after, and before Vietnam, and so he functions as a kind of organizing principle, a center for all the narratives. It’s his youth, his America, his abortive draft dodging into Canada, his dead girlfriend from long ago, his publication of Norman Bowker’s story (read by Bowker shortly before his suicide), and his conversations with his daughter that present and connect all the anecdotes and reflections that comprise the novel.
But despite his centering of the episodes on himself, O’Brien frequently blurs the line between those things that happened to him as an individual, those things that happened to his fellow soldiers and friends, and those things that would or could happen to any individual in a universal sense. O’Brien is repeatedly deliberate in undercutting the precision of the facts and situations he narrates. He mixes situations, persons, and events, and he invites the reader into the thought processes and choices behind the mixing process.
Through the jumbled, skewed narratives, O’Brien seems to be trying to guide outsiders to some important, but difficult truths that might not be accessed through a more conventional, certain, or orderly narrative flow. Never is the blurring more “true” than in the case of Norman Bowker and the story of Kiowa’s death in the “shit field.” It is only after O’Brien tells Bowker’s story that he adds the revision that it was he, O’Brien, and not Bowker, who let Kiowa drown in the field. In an instant, all of Norman Bowker’s grief and distress is overlaid atop of Tim O’Brien’s, and distinguishing the two identities becomes impossible—and irrelevant.
In fact, O’Brien’s revelation prompts us to question whether this is, in fact, O’Brien’s novel, for might not the entire collection be viewed it as an extended “ghost writer’s” revision of the “long, disjointed letter” Bowker sent to O’Brien “in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war” (155). O’Brien comments on Bowker’s letter as follows:
The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know what to feel. . . . (156)
What is the “truth” of Bowker’s feelings here? Part of O’Brien’s list? All of it? A mixture of it? The poetics of The Things They Carried suggest that it is all of the above, plus O’Brien’s novel itself, plus all the other “good war stories.” We just can’t know. . . .
But a certain truth about mental health and survival does emerge from the Bowker episode, for it shows how the chances of survival and health improve to the degree individuals are able to convert the experiences into words and stories that get communicated. Bowker wrote O’Brien a letter, but he couldn’t quite articulate what he felt. With the exception of his letter, Bowker remained silent, at the great cost of his eventual suicide. Those who cannot speak, who cannot convert the experience of Vietnam into story, seem doomed—burdened to carry something they will have to “hump” the rest of their lives, provided they survive the battlefield and “mind field” during and after the war.
The storytelling, however, is not the only important thing: “Getting it right” is crucial. Throughout its disjointed narratives, The Things They Carried presents a strong theme on the notion of “good form,” appropriate storytelling, even if appropriateness leads away from facts and conventional truths.
Good Form . . . Getting it Right
It is roughly one-third of the way into The Things They Carried that O’Brien explicitly introduces the theme of storytelling and good form. The chapter is aptly named “How to Tell a War Story.” It deals with subtleties of phrasing, structure, and message, and at one point provides explicit criteria for a “true war story”:
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. 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. (68-69)
Interspersed among these prescriptions and reflections are some “true war stories,” offered as illustrations, and sometimes announced by the claim “This is true” (67). But ironically the narrator suggests that the parts that aren’t actually identifiable as true carry the greater weight of truth:
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed. (71)
The experience of war, chaotic and fragmentary and intense as it is, is beyond the packaging of words. Hence there is a need for lying—but not with the purpose of deceiving, but rather for accuracy. Words or stories that would “conclude” or “generalize” would distort or distract. “How do you generalize?” the narrator asks. He explains:
War is hell, but that’s not he half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth, was is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. . . .
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. (80)
As for “accuracy” in regards to words and storytelling, the experience of war puts you in a “fog”:
There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.
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 nothing is ever absolutely true. (82)
And then there is the occasional need for a lie to convey the truth, for
[a]bsolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.
That’s a true story that never happened. (83-84)
In one sense truth becomes a kind of calling towards “form.” Form gives order—an emotional order, a felt sense—a reality that can be communicated, but only, perhaps, if the gaps, the parts you miss when you are ducking and closing your eyes or thinking in panic, are stroked over or filled out by some invented or re-created structure in the re-telling.
The only urgent need in storytelling is to “get it right.” One of the great war stories of the novel involves a tale not told directly by Tim O’Brien, but rather by his friend, Rat Kiley, an even less reliable narrator than Tim: “Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts” 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” (89-90). Rat’s story involves the the bringing over of Mark Fossie’s girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, from the states to Vietnam. Though it has many comical elements, Rat tells the story more as a “straight tragedy.” Rat’s story spans several pages in the book and several weeks in the war; it “make[s] things present” (180), and it casts a spell—until Rat’s narrative style jars the aesthetic sensibilities of fellow soldier Mitchell Sanders:
Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself. (106)
Apparently, however, a good part of Rat’s story was the reflective, interspersed commentary, analysis, and glossing, for he proves intractable in his narrative style. O’Brien continues Rat’s narration of Mary Anne Bell’s adventures in Vietnam. After a particularly lengthy commentary by Rat on the reality of the story, Mitchell Sanders reaches a breaking point:
Rat would go on like that until Mitchell Sanders couldn’t tolerate it any longer. It offended his inner ear.
“The story,” Sanders would say. “The whole tone, man, you’re wrecking it.”
“Tone?”
“The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s sound. Stick to what happened.
“Tone?” he’d say. “I didn’t know it was all that complicated. The girl joined the zoo. One more animal—end of story.”
“Yeah, fine. But tell it right.” (107)
Rat behaves better for a while and continues on with the story till its end—or rather its first false ending, when Rat throws up his hands and ends the story abruptly, saying, in essence, he didn’t have an ending for the story because he was transferred and never saw Mary Anne Bell or Mark Fossie again.
Rat Kiley stopped there, almost in midsentence, which drove Mitchell Sanders crazy.
“What’s next?” he said.
“Next?”
“The girl. What happened to her?”
Rat made a small, tired motion with his shoulders. “Hard to tell for sure. Maybe three, four days later I got orders to report here to Alpha Company. Jumped the first chopper out, and that’s the last I ever seen of the place. Mary Anne, too.”
Mitchell Sanders stared at him.
“You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Jesus Christ, it’s against the rules,” Sanders said. “Against human nature. This elaborate story, you can’t say, Hey, by the way, I don’t know the ending. I mean, you got certain obligations.” (112-113)
Here and elsewhere throughout the novel, we see that matters of form pre-empt matters of truth. Good form—however it is achieved, through lying, mixing perspectives and time period, forming connections, telling and trying to tell “correctly”—offers hope not only for diversion or entertainment, but for catharsis, some unburdening, even as the burden remains with us. . . .
Comparing Tim O’Brien to Another “Unreliable”
Minnesotan
I read The Things They Carried in the summer of 2006, at about the same time that I read a review of Garrison Keillor’s movie, A Prairie Home Companion. Like Tim O’Brien, Garrison Keillor is a Minnesotan, and that fact is perhaps just as telling as all the lies either author uses in his fiction. Keillor also uses an “unreliable narrator”—a correspondent who is a fictionalized version of himself who each week reports the news from his fictional home town, Lake Wobegon. Reviewer Sam Anderson characterizes Keillor’s narrative approach in terms of larger literary traditions that provide a useful context, by way of contrast, for the current discussion of Tim O’Brien’s “unreliability”:
Keillor has . . . turned himself into a kind of EveryMidwesterner. When he started as a writer and radio host in the early 1970s, America’s major regions had all been thoroughly mythologized—there was Faulkner’s Mississippi, Steinbeck’s California, and everybody else’s New York. But the Midwest was, relatively speaking, a blank slate. Like Faulkner, Keillor invented a fictional territory—a mythical Minnesota hamlet called Lake Wobegon, “the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve”—and dedicated his career to exploring it. (Wobegon is a little like Yoknapatawpha County, but Midwestern—i.e., with all the murder, rape, class warfare, and incest translated into gardening, ice fishing, and gentle boyish hijinks.) Wobegon allowed him to be both culturally specific—every story is loaded with landmarks and proper names—and yet free from the tyranny of fact. He honored his native culture by gently mocking it, an approach that ingeniously echoed the region’s ethic of self-deprecating pride. (“A Prairie Home Conundrum” in Slate, June 16, 2006)
Contrasting O’Brien’s technique with Keillor’s helps clarify the qualities of “unreliability.” For unlike Keillor with the Midwest, O’Brien is not “mythologizing” Vietnam. He is not translating the murder, shit, and warfare into anything else. He is not gently mocking anything about Vietnam to honor the experience or ennoble it or its participants. Like Keillor, O’Brien has cut himself off from the “tyranny of fact”—but with an end toward communicating a “more real” truth rather than engaging in overt fiction as Keillor does.
Despite their lies and their nuanced use of them, both Keillor and O’Brien narrate stories to communicate some kind of truth. In Keillor’s case, the truth is some abstract principle of region and character and nostalgic possibility. In O’Brien’s case the truth is much more concrete and focused: it’s the impact of an event on a poet. Send a poet to Vietnam, and this is what you get. And so, given this mixed situation, the truth of The Things They Carried is both hard and soft. On the one hand we have the hard impact of a war on a young person’s life—and the resilient way that young person carries with him that thing throughout life afterwards and even before the impact, as, through memory and imagination, the after-shock is analogized to and mysteriously linked with earlier childhood experiences. So hard is this impact that it strikes backwards, and reorients the past as well as propels the future. But the truth is soft too, like a dream that reanimates the dead.
The experiences live on in the stories, and that life can offer some remedy to the waste of a war. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.” And more: “That is what a story does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk.”
The dream allows the kind of connections and “essences” that the “tyranny of fact” forbids. The dream allows “Tim O’Brien” to look back over his life, its various phases from childhood and beyond, and see “something absolute and unchanging. The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice; a little kid, a twenty-three-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow” (236). Such is the unreliability of a narrator who shows us, through memory and imagination, the edges and diffusions of human life, all one thing that it is over the span of our time.