{"id":74,"date":"2006-07-08T16:16:58","date_gmt":"2006-07-08T22:16:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/bonadonna\/blog\/?p=74"},"modified":"2024-03-22T07:28:49","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T13:28:49","slug":"reading-response-to-the-things-they-carried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/74","title":{"rendered":"Truth, Lies, and Good Form in Novels: Reading Response to The Things They Carried"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Unreliable Narrator as Liar v. Unreliable
\nNarrator as Guide<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Whenever I think of the concept of the “unreliable narrator” in literature,\u00a0I think of Edgar Allan Poe, and stories of his like the “Tell-Tale Heart,”\u00a0“The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Using\u00a0Poe’s fiction as a type of manual, my teachers in graduate school taught me\u00a0how to interrogate a narrator’s credibility; I was taught, in essence, to read\u00a0against<\/em> the narrative, to look for signs of contradiction, to chart\u00a0the extremes of obsession, to diagnose mental illness. The typical Poe narrator\u00a0strategically and rationally tells his story\u2014at least seemingly, or professedly,\u00a0so at the start. But in focusing on his “reality,” his guilt, the\u00a0perfection of his crime, the intensity of his experience, and so on, he pulls\u00a0us into a monomania that has afflicted him and distorts his vision; his tale\u00a0blurs the line between sanity and insanity, and leaves its readers with questions, possibilities, and disturbances.<\/p>\n

I learned that reading Poe attentively required a double consciousness: reading\u00a0the story and reading the story behind<\/em> the story. The teacher in me\u00a0now sees that Poe’s fiction, in its extremes, provided my teachers a convenient\u00a0point of entry into the world of literary hermeneutics in general. For Poe,\u00a0it could be argued, put into bold relief general issues of interpretation that\u00a0pertain to every<\/em> narrative. Just what<\/em> could be trusted of\u00a0any<\/em> narrator or author? Once you looked for the signs of “insanity”\u00a0or “unreliability”\u2014or contradiction<\/em>\u2014in the more\u00a0obvious instances of Poe’s fiction, you started to perceive possible doubts\u00a0and truth issues in all accounts everywhere. Contemporary literary criticism,\u00a0of course, has jumped off this springboard into a whole realm of interpretive\u00a0doubt and potentiality about all language and reality.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

With the novel, The Things They Carried<\/em>, the concept of the unreliable\u00a0narrator comes full circle. The narrator of this novel, “Tim O’Brien,”\u00a0is definitely “unreliable”\u2014but unlike Poe’s narrators who tried\u00a0to come across as believable, O’Brien’s narrator deliberately announces the\u00a0inadequacy of his facts and overall storytelling. Instead of hiding\u00a0<\/em>the cracks in his story (or professing sanity and validity like Poe’s narrators),\u00a0“Tim O’Brien” explicitly focuses on them, and in doing so, he ironically\u2014upon\u00a0such a foundation\u2014constructs a poignant set of truths<\/em>\u2014both\u00a0about the significance of his lived experience and about something far larger:\u00a0the nature of storytelling, truth, memory, and imagination in general.<\/p>\n

The Things They Carried<\/em>: Whose Story?
\nWhat Truth?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In this novel, Tim O’Brien (author? narrator? both?) speaks of his experiences\u00a0during, after, and before Vietnam, and so he functions as a kind of organizing\u00a0principle, a center for all the narratives. It’s his youth, his America, his\u00a0abortive draft dodging into Canada, his dead girlfriend from long ago, his publication\u00a0of Norman Bowker’s story (read by Bowker shortly before his suicide), and his\u00a0conversations with his daughter that present and connect all the anecdotes and\u00a0reflections that comprise the novel.<\/p>\n

But despite his centering of the episodes on himself, O’Brien frequently blurs\u00a0the line between those things that happened to him as an individual, those things\u00a0that happened to his fellow soldiers and friends, and those things that would\u00a0or could happen to any individual in a universal sense. O’Brien is repeatedly\u00a0deliberate in undercutting the precision of the facts and situations he narrates.\u00a0He mixes situations, persons, and events, and he invites the reader into the\u00a0thought processes and choices behind the mixing process.<\/p>\n

Through the jumbled, skewed narratives, O’Brien seems to be trying to guide\u00a0outsiders to some important, but difficult truths that might not be accessed\u00a0through a more conventional, certain, or orderly narrative flow. Never is the\u00a0blurring more “true” than in the case of Norman Bowker and the story\u00a0of Kiowa’s death in the “shit field.” It is only after O’Brien tells\u00a0Bowker’s story that he adds the revision that it was he, O’Brien, and not Bowker,\u00a0who let Kiowa drown in the field. In an instant, all of Norman Bowker’s grief\u00a0and distress is overlaid atop of Tim O’Brien’s, and distinguishing the two identities\u00a0becomes impossible\u2014and irrelevant.<\/p>\n

In fact, O’Brien’s revelation prompts us to question whether this is, in fact,\u00a0O’Brien’s novel, for might not the entire collection be viewed it as an extended\u00a0“ghost writer’s” revision<\/em> of the “long, disjointed letter”\u00a0Bowker sent to O’Brien “in which Bowker described the problem of finding\u00a0a meaningful use for his life after the war” (155). O’Brien comments on\u00a0Bowker’s letter as follows:<\/p>\n

The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity\u00a0to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know\u00a0what to feel.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. (156)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What is the “truth” of Bowker’s feelings here? Part of O’Brien’s\u00a0list? All of it? A mixture of it? The poetics of The Things They Carried\u00a0<\/em>suggest that it is all of the above, plus O’Brien’s novel itself, plus all the\u00a0other “good war stories.” We just can’t know.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

But a certain truth about mental health and survival does emerge from the Bowker\u00a0episode, for it shows how the chances of survival and health improve to the\u00a0degree individuals are able to convert the experiences into words and stories\u00a0that get communicated. Bowker wrote O’Brien a letter, but he couldn’t quite\u00a0articulate what he felt. With the exception of his letter, Bowker remained silent,\u00a0at the great cost of his eventual suicide. Those who cannot speak, who cannot\u00a0convert the experience of Vietnam into story, seem doomed\u2014burdened to\u00a0carry something they will have to “hump” the rest of their lives,\u00a0provided they survive the battlefield and “mind field” during and\u00a0after the war.<\/p>\n

The storytelling, however, is not the only important thing: “Getting it\u00a0right” is crucial. Throughout its disjointed narratives, The Things\u00a0They Carried<\/em> presents a strong theme on the notion of “good form,”\u00a0appropriate storytelling, even if appropriateness leads away from facts and\u00a0conventional truths.<\/p>\n

Good Form\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Getting it Right<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It is roughly one-third of the way into The Things They Carried<\/em> that\u00a0O’Brien explicitly introduces the theme of storytelling and good form. The chapter\u00a0is aptly named “How to Tell a War Story.” It deals with subtleties\u00a0of phrasing, structure, and message, and at one point provides explicit criteria\u00a0for a “true war story”:<\/p>\n

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue,\u00a0nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the\u00a0things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If\u00a0at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small\u00a0bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been\u00a0made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. (68-69)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interspersed among these prescriptions and reflections are some “true\u00a0war stories,” offered as illustrations, and sometimes announced by the\u00a0claim “This is true” (67). But ironically the narrator suggests that\u00a0the parts that aren’t actually identifiable as true carry the greater weight\u00a0of truth:<\/p>\n

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what\u00a0happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own\u00a0happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When\u00a0a 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\u00a0and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot.\u00a0And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal\u00a0seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents\u00a0the hard and exact truth as it seemed<\/em>. (71)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The experience of war, chaotic and fragmentary and intense as it is, is beyond\u00a0the packaging of words. Hence there is a need for lying\u2014but not with the purpose\u00a0of deceiving, but rather for accuracy<\/em>. Words or stories that would\u00a0“conclude” or “generalize” would distort or distract. “How\u00a0do you generalize?” the narrator asks. He explains:<\/p>\n

War is hell, but that’s not he half of it, because war is also mystery and\u00a0terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair\u00a0and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery.\u00a0War makes you a man; war makes you dead.<\/p>\n

The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is\u00a0grotesque. But in truth, was is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t\u00a0help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything\u00a0is true. Almost nothing is true. (80)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As for “accuracy” in regards to words and storytelling, the experience\u00a0of war puts you in a “fog”:<\/p>\n

There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding,\u00a0the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends\u00a0into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility\u00a0into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why\u00a0you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.<\/p>\n

In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself,\u00a0and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely\u00a0true. (82)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then there is the occasional need<\/em> for a lie to convey the truth,\u00a0for<\/p>\n

[a]bsolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie;\u00a0another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four\u00a0guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the\u00a0blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die,\u00a0though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that<\/em> for?”\u00a0and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy\u00a0starts to smile but he’s dead.<\/p>\n

That’s a true story that never happened. (83-84)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In one sense truth becomes a kind of calling towards “form.” Form\u00a0gives order\u2014an emotional order, a felt sense\u2014a reality that can\u00a0be communicated, but only, perhaps, if the gaps, the parts you miss when you\u00a0are ducking and closing your eyes or thinking in panic, are stroked over or\u00a0filled out by some invented or re-created structure in the re-telling.<\/p>\n

The only urgent need in storytelling is to “get it right.” One of\u00a0the great war stories of the novel involves a tale not told directly by Tim\u00a0O’Brien, but rather by his friend, Rat Kiley, an even less<\/em> reliable\u00a0narrator than Tim: “Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement,\u00a0a compulsion to rev up the facts” and “when you listened to one of\u00a0his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head,\u00a0subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying\u00a0by maybe” (89-90). Rat’s story involves the the bringing over of Mark Fossie’s\u00a0girlfriend, Mary Anne Bell, from the states to Vietnam. Though it has many comical\u00a0elements, Rat tells the story more as a “straight tragedy.” Rat’s\u00a0story spans several pages in the book and several weeks in the war; it “make[s]\u00a0things present” (180), and it casts a spell\u2014until Rat’s narrative style\u00a0jars the aesthetic sensibilities of fellow soldier Mitchell Sanders:<\/p>\n

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting\u00a0the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal\u00a0opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters\u00a0is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your\u00a0own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic.\u00a0What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out\u00a0of the way and let it tell itself. (106)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apparently, however, a good part of Rat’s story was the reflective, interspersed\u00a0commentary, analysis, and glossing, for he proves intractable in his narrative\u00a0style. O’Brien continues Rat’s narration of Mary Anne Bell’s adventures in Vietnam.\u00a0After a particularly lengthy commentary by Rat on the reality of the story,\u00a0Mitchell Sanders reaches a breaking point:<\/p>\n

Rat would go on like that until Mitchell Sanders couldn’t tolerate it any\u00a0longer. It offended his inner ear.<\/p>\n

“The story,” Sanders would say. “The whole tone, man, you’re\u00a0wrecking it.”<\/p>\n

“Tone?”<\/p>\n

“The sound<\/em>. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or\u00a0fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s\u00a0sound<\/em>. \u00a0Stick to what happened.<\/p>\n

“Tone?” he’d say. “I didn’t know it was all that complicated.\u00a0The girl joined the zoo. One more animal\u2014end of story.”<\/p>\n

“Yeah, fine. But tell it right.” (107)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rat behaves better for a while and continues on with the story till its end\u2014or\u00a0rather its first false ending, when Rat throws up his hands and ends the story\u00a0abruptly, saying, in essence, he didn’t have an ending for the story because\u00a0he was transferred and never saw Mary Anne Bell or Mark Fossie again.<\/p>\n

Rat Kiley stopped there, almost in midsentence, which drove Mitchell Sanders\u00a0crazy.<\/p>\n

“What’s next?” he said.<\/p>\n

“Next?”<\/p>\n

“The girl. What happened to her?”<\/p>\n

Rat made a small, tired motion with his shoulders. “Hard to tell for\u00a0sure. Maybe three, four days later I got orders to report here to Alpha Company.\u00a0Jumped the first chopper out, and that’s the last I ever seen of the place.\u00a0Mary Anne, too.”<\/p>\n

Mitchell Sanders stared at him.<\/p>\n

“You can’t do that.”<\/p>\n

“Do what?”<\/p>\n

“Jesus Christ, it’s against the rules<\/em>,” Sanders said.\u00a0“Against human nature<\/em>. This elaborate story, you can’t say,\u00a0Hey, by the way, I don’t know the ending<\/em>. I mean, you got certain\u00a0obligations.” (112-113)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here and elsewhere throughout the novel, we see that matters of form pre-empt\u00a0matters of truth. Good form\u2014however it is achieved, through lying, mixing\u00a0perspectives and time period, forming connections, telling and trying to tell\u00a0“correctly”\u2014offers hope not only for diversion or entertainment,\u00a0but for catharsis, some unburdening, even as the burden remains with us.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p>\n

Comparing Tim O’Brien to Another “Unreliable”
\nMinnesotan<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I read The Things They Carried<\/em> in the summer of 2006, at about the\u00a0same time that I read a review of Garrison Keillor’s movie, A Prairie Home\u00a0Companion<\/em>. Like Tim O’Brien, Garrison Keillor is a Minnesotan, and that\u00a0fact is perhaps just as telling as all the lies either author uses in his fiction.\u00a0Keillor also uses an “unreliable narrator”\u2014a correspondent who\u00a0is a fictionalized version of himself who each week reports the news from his\u00a0fictional home town, Lake Wobegon. Reviewer Sam\u00a0Anderson<\/a> characterizes Keillor’s narrative approach in terms of larger literary\u00a0traditions that provide a useful context, by way of contrast, for the current\u00a0discussion of Tim O’Brien’s “unreliability”:<\/p>\n

Keillor has .\u00a0.\u00a0. turned himself into a kind of EveryMidwesterner.\u00a0When he started as a writer and radio host in the early 1970s, America’s major\u00a0regions had all been thoroughly mythologized\u2014there was Faulkner’s Mississippi,\u00a0Steinbeck’s California, and everybody else’s New York. But the Midwest was,\u00a0relatively speaking, a blank slate. Like Faulkner, Keillor invented a fictional\u00a0territory\u2014a mythical Minnesota hamlet called Lake Wobegon, “the\u00a0little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve”\u2014and\u00a0dedicated his career to exploring it. (Wobegon is a little like Yoknapatawpha\u00a0County, but Midwestern\u2014i.e., with all the murder, rape, class warfare,\u00a0and incest translated into gardening, ice fishing, and gentle boyish hijinks.)\u00a0Wobegon allowed him to be both culturally specific\u2014every story is loaded\u00a0with landmarks and proper names\u2014and yet free from the tyranny of fact.\u00a0He honored his native culture by gently mocking it, an approach that ingeniously\u00a0echoed the region’s ethic of self-deprecating pride. (“A\u00a0Prairie Home Conundrum<\/a>” in Slate<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0June 16, 2006)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Contrasting O’Brien’s technique with Keillor’s helps clarify the qualities\u00a0of “unreliability.” For unlike Keillor with the Midwest, O’Brien is\u00a0not “mythologizing” Vietnam. He is not translating the murder, shit,\u00a0and warfare into anything else. He is not gently mocking anything about Vietnam\u00a0to honor the experience or ennoble it or its participants. Like Keillor, O’Brien\u00a0has cut himself off from the “tyranny of fact”\u2014but with an end\u00a0toward communicating a “more real” truth rather than engaging in overt fiction as Keillor does.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0is 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\u00a0of an event on a poet. Send a poet to Vietnam, and this is what you get. And\u00a0so, given this mixed situation, the truth of The Things They Carried\u00a0<\/em>is both hard and soft. On the one hand we have the hard impact of a war on a\u00a0young person’s life\u2014and the resilient way that young person carries with him\u00a0that thing throughout life afterwards and even before <\/em>the impact, as,\u00a0through memory and imagination, the after-shock is analogized to and mysteriously\u00a0linked with earlier childhood experiences. So hard is this impact that it strikes\u00a0backwards, and reorients the past as well as propels the future. But the truth\u00a0is soft too, like a dream that reanimates the dead.<\/p>\n

The experiences live on in the stories, and that life can offer some remedy\u00a0to the waste of a war. “The thing about a story is that you dream it as\u00a0you 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.\u00a0There is the illusion of aliveness.” And more: “That is what a story\u00a0does. The bodies are animated. You make the dead talk.”<\/p>\n

The dream allows the kind of connections and “essences” that the\u00a0“tyranny of fact” forbids. The dream allows “Tim O’Brien”\u00a0to look back over his life, its various phases from childhood and beyond, and\u00a0see “something absolute and unchanging. The human life is all one thing,\u00a0like a blade tracing loops on ice; a little kid, a twenty-three-old infantry\u00a0sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow” (236). Such is\u00a0the unreliability of a narrator who shows us, through memory and imagination,\u00a0the edges and diffusions of human life, all one thing that it is over the span\u00a0of our time.<\/p>\n

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The Unreliable Narrator as Liar v. Unreliable Narrator as Guide Whenever I think of the concept of the “unreliable narrator” in literature,\u00a0I think of Edgar Allan Poe, and stories of his like the “Tell-Tale Heart,”\u00a0“The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Using\u00a0Poe’s fiction as a type of manual, my teachers in … Continue reading Truth, Lies, and Good Form in Novels: Reading Response to The Things They Carried<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-on-teaching-and-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1029,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/1029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}