Extra Credit

Optional extra credit is DUE NO LATER than the first day of class, the week of Nov. 7th.

Some of you have moaned and groaned about extra credit, so here it is. I have posted three different research articles on Tim O'Brien.  

For minimal extra credit (5%), read the article by D.J.R. Bruckner, "Storyteller for a War that Won't End," and write a two page synopsis of the article. The synopsis must be well written and in your own words, with no quotes from Bruckner. The synopsis must demonstrate a clear understanding of the article and in clear, coherent writing clearly state the essence of the article.

For maximum extra credit (10%), read either the article by Steven Kaplan, "The Things They Carried: Understanding Tim O'Brien" or Patrick Hicks, "A Conversation with Tim O'Brien" and write a two-three page synopsis of the article. The synopsis must be well written and in your own words, with no quotes from the author. The synopsis must demonstrate a clear understanding of the article and in clear, coherent writing clearly state the essence of the article.

BOO!

The Things They Carried - Essay Topics #3 - DUE: THE SECOND DAY OF CLASS, the week of October 31, 2011; length: approximately 800 words. (About 3 pages, 12 pt. font, MLA format--DO use quotes from the novel, with citations and bibliography; you might also want to read and reference from the posted research material on O'Brien) 


1. The Importance of Storytelling to the Men of Alpha Company.
Storytelling is vital to all of the characters in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, not just the narrator. What stories are told by Mitch Sanders, Rat Kiley, Jimmy Cross, and Norman Bowker? What benefit comes to each man from telling stories? In what way are these men “saved” by their stories? Who is the one man who is unable to tell stories? What happens to him? In summary, what does this book suggest about the power of storytelling?

2. Guilt as a Motivating Factor in the Lives of the Men of Alpha Company.
How does guilt enter the lives of Jimmy Cross, Tim O’Brien, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Dave Jensen, Curt Lemon? Why is shame or guilt so difficult? In what way does guilt compel each man to make emotional, rather than logical decisions? How does storytelling help relieve some of the guilt?

3. The Things They Carried as a Metaphor of Life.
Discuss the concept of war as a metaphor for life; that is, in what way is all life a war? How are both a kind of crucible in which the human heart is constantly "under pressure"? How does paradox in the novel reveal the conflicts and confusion of the war and of life? For example, how is this novel of the Vietnam war a novel about love? How does the horror and ugliness of war bring out the beauty of nature as well as the goodness and decency of some of  the men of Alpha Company?

4. “Truth” in The Things They Carried
Aeschylus, the Greek philosopher and playwright, said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried is very much concerned with the truth of war. How does O’Brien distinguish between the “happening-truth” and the “story-truth”? Which is more important? Why? How does storytelling—the use of fiction—allow for a greater sense of truth than factual reporting might? What are the pervading truths of this novel?

Critical Essay #3: "Storyteller for a War that Won't End"

Title: Storyteller for a War that Won't End

Author(s): D. J. R. Bruckner

Publication Details: The New York Times. (Apr. 3, 1990): pC15.

Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism.

.

Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 103. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Book review

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1998 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(review date 3 April 1990) Below, Bruckner assesses O'Brien's storytelling abilities in The Things They Carried, especially the way he interweaves fact and fiction.]
For the first time since his Army tour of duty in Vietnam ended 20 years ago, Tim O'Brien will be going back in June. The official reason for the trip is a conference of American and Vietnamese writers in Hanoi. A more personal one for Mr. O'Brien is to return to the area around the village of My Lai.
"When the unit I went in with got there in February of 1969," he said the other day, "we all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew. There is a monument in My Lai now and I want to see it."
Vietnam has never left Mr. O'Brien. The country, the war and the men who fought it have filled most of his published fiction, and his latest volume, The Things They Carried, is a series of interconnected stories about the war and its victims--and about the whole business of concocting stories.
There will probably be more war stories. In a telephone interview from Minneapolis, where he was promoting The Things They Carried, Mr. O'Brien said: "After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell--in fact, more all the time. I suppose that for the sake of my career, I ought to turn in another direction. And the novel I am working on now is about life in the north country of Minnesota. But I know more war stories will come out. They have to."
For Mr. O'Brien the stories are larger than the war, and considerably more important. Those in The Things They Carried are at least as much about storytelling as about men at war. Some retell in a different way stories already told. Narrators dispute the accuracy of what they themselves are saying. Occasionally a narrator will come to the end of a harrowing tale and then insist that the protagonist did not do the terrible or heroic things he has just recited, but that he himself did them.
Characters snatch stories from one another's mouths and tell them in a different way, with different incidents. A character may take part of a story away from a narrator and refashion it. A first-person commentator who intervenes to critique or correct a story just told, and who can easily be mistaken for Mr. O'Brien, may turn out to be a character in a later story. The stories themselves eventually seem to be engaged in a dialogue about invention. "As you play with stories you find that whatever is said is not sufficient to the task," Mr. O'Brien said.
In 1978, when Mr. O'Brien's third novel, Going After Cacciato, appeared, some critics said his tale of an American soldier who simply walked away from the Vietnam War had strong elements of the Latin American school of fiction called magic realism. In his new work the magic is in the storyteller's prestidigitation as the stories pass from character to character and voice to voice, and the realism seems Homeric. Mr. O'Brien seems a little startled when he is asked about that, but he admits that the Trojan War epics of the ancient Greek poet keep drawing him back. There is not a line in The Things They Carried that imitates Homer, but at times he is such a presence that he might be included as an unnamed character--in the underlying assumptions about fate, in the enmity of the earth itself toward men in battle, in the sheer glory of fighting, in the boasting of young men.
Storytelling preceded war for Mr. O'Brien, or at least some kind of writing did. He grew up in the southern Minnesota town of Worthington--"the Turkey Capital of the World"--and was there, a month out of Macalaster College in St. Paul, when his draft notice arrived. He had always liked fiction, and books, but he had majored in political science and certainly had no intention to be a writer.
His reaction to the draft notice still surprises him. "I went to my room in the basement and started pounding the typewriter," he recalled. "I did it all summer. It was the most terrible summer of my life, worse than being in the war. My conscience kept telling me not to go, but my whole upbringing told me I had to. That horrible summer made me a writer. I don't know what I wrote. I've still got it, reams of it, but I'm not willing to look at it. It was just stuff--bitter, bitter stuff, and it's probably full of self-pity. But that was the beginning."
He tried to abort the impulse. After he returned from Vietnam in 1970 he went back to political science, doing graduate work in government at Harvard University--"I think I thought I might become the next Henry Kissinger," he said--before a brief stint as a reporter for The Washington Post.
But the stories would not be stopped. So far they have filled five books; his impression is that they are multiplying all the time in his head. He talks about them like an evangelist or a prophet. "My life is storytelling," he said. "I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. And if I have started now to play with the stories, inside the stories themselves, well, that's what people do all the time.
"Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. In Vietnam men were constantly telling one another stories about the war. Our unit lost a lot of guys around My Lai, but the stories they told stay around after them. I would be mad not to tell the stories I know."
The stories, then, live on their own, and their relationship to reality is not direct. Mr. O'Brien uses his infectious laugh to punctuate his confession that the insistent reality of characters he has been imagining for 20 years often makes him impatient with people he has not imagined: "I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy."
The intense reality of his characters explains a puzzle in The Things They Carried. The book begins with a disclaimer: except for a few details all the characters and incidents are imaginary. But then there is a dedication to a company of soldiers, especially to six who are named. Then these six turn up in the stories. "Well, yes, I dedicated the book to my characters," Mr. O'Brien said. "After all, I lived with them for five years while I was writing. In Vietnam people were being rotated constantly, so men you served with you would know six or eight months. These characters are the people I know best."
Where do they come from? Invariably they begin with "a scrap of dialogue, a way of saying something, in one form or another always with language. There's a whisper inside the ear that begins each of them." They spring from spoken words, even those who are quite inarticulate. In The Things They Carried, the central character of one story, "The Man I Killed," is, as Mr. O'Brien puts it, "offstage," and writing a story about a character who is not there was "a wonderful technical challenge."
But the character's voice, the "way of saying something" that inspired his creation, is not silenced. He turns up elsewhere as a narrator. His name is Tim; other people call him O'Brien. And therein lies another tale. A reader is well advised to heed the book's opening caution that "this is a work of fiction" in which all the characters are made up, as are all the disputes the narrators have about the truth of the stories. This Tim, like Mr. O'Brien, comes originally from Minnesota and is 43 years old. Everything else, even most of the convincing personal details about his life and family, is made up.
It is disappointing to find that Tim's 9-year-old daughter is an invention, not just because she is appealing but because her father's feelings about her role as an interrogator of his conscience are so powerful. She was the most difficult of all the characters to create, Mr. O'Brien said: "I had to keep going back and cutting a lot for the verisimilitude. But, you see, in a way she is real, the child I do not have. Storytelling can even do that for you."
But stories are not all he dreams about. Several years ago he told a reporter he wanted to have a best seller, "not just read in English classes." Now, he said: "I want both. After all, I don't write just for myself. It's really annoying to be on a plane coming out here and see the guy in the next seat reading someone else. So, sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality."

Source Citation

Bruckner, D. J. R. "Storyteller for a War that Won't End." The New York Times (3 Apr. 1990): C15. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Schmitt. Vol. 103. Detroit: Gale Research, 1998. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1100001814&v=2.1&u=maco12153&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

Critical Essay #2: "The Things They Carried"

Title: The Things They Carried

Author(s): Steven Kaplan

Publication Details: Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Source: Short Story Criticism.

.

Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(essay date 1995) In the following essay, Kaplan contends that in The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien "emphasizes the magical powers of storytelling," incorporating both factual writing and memoir to create fiction that is "truer than fact."]

Before America became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam, it had to, as one historian recently put it, "invent" the country and the political issues at stake there.¹ The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and macabre storytellers. First, America decided for Vietnam what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression according to American standards; then, the United States military traveled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make America's notions about these things clear to the Vietnamese people, eventually using brute technological force.
For the American military and government, the Vietnam they had in effect invented became fact. For the soldiers they then sent there, however, the facts their government had created about who the enemy was, what the issues were, and how the war was to be won were quickly overshadowed by a world of uncertainty. Ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense at all. As David Halberstram puts it in his novel One Very Hot Day, the only fact of which an American soldier in Vietnam could be certain was that "yes was no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe."² Almost all Vietnam War writing--fiction and nonfiction--makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain. As Philip Beidler has pointed out, "Most of the time in Vietnam, there were some things that seemed just too terrible and strange to be true and others that were just too terrible and true to be strange."³
The main question that Beidler's study of the literature of the war raises is how, considering the overwhelming ambiguity that characterized the Vietnam experience, could any sense or meaning be derived from what happened and, above all, how could this meaning, if it were found, be conveyed to those who had not experienced the war? The answer for Beidler is that "Words are all we have. In the hands of true artists ... they may yet preserve us against the darkness."⁴ Similarly, for Tim O'Brien the language of fiction is the most accurate means for conveying, again as Beidler puts it, "what happened (in Vietnam) ... what might have happened, what could have happened, what should have happened, and maybe also what can be kept from happening or what can be made to happen."⁵ If the experience of Vietnam and its accompanying sense of chaos and confusion can be shown at all, then for Tim O'Brien it will not be in the fictions created by politicians but in the stories told by writers of fiction.
In The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O'Brien takes the act of trying to reveal and understand the uncertainties about the war by looking at it through the imagination perhaps a step further than he did in Going After Cacciato.⁶ In The Things They Carried, O'Brien destroys the line dividing fact from fiction, and tries to show even more so than in Cacciato that fiction (or the imagined world) can often be truer than fact. As in all of his other works, in The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien emphasizes the magical powers of storytelling. He also takes his readers straight into the middle of the process through which facts and memory are transformed in fiction.
The book's first chapter provides a precise account of the items referred to in its title: the things they carried. O'Brien introduces the reader here to some things, both imaginary and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average foot soldier carried through the Vietnamese jungles. O'Brien depicts all of the "things" that appear in the first chapter in a precise, scientific style. The reader is told how much each object weighs, either psychologically or physically, and in the case of artillery, O'Brien even says how many ounces each round weighed: "As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum."⁷
As this passage shows, even the most insignificant details seem to be worth mentioning. Accordingly, one of the main characters is not just from Oklahoma City but from "Oklahoma City, Oklahoma" (5), as if mentioning the state might somehow make the location more factual, more certain. More striking than this obsession with even the minutest detail, however, is the academic tone that at times makes the narrative sound like a government report. The reader finds, for example, such transitional phrases as "for instance" (5) and "in addition" (7), and whole paragraphs dominated by sentences that begin with "because" (5). O'Brien is striving, above all else, to convince his readers of the importance, the authenticity, of the things they carried.
In the midst of all of this factuality and certainty, however, there are signals that all of the information O'Brien gives the reader in this opening chapter will not amount to much, that the facts are merely there to conceal uncertainties, and that the words that follow the frequent "becauses" do not explain anything. The reader is told in the opening pages, for example, that the most important thing First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried were some letters from a girl he loved. The narrator, one of Cross's friends in the war and now a forty-three-year-old writer named Tim O'Brien, tells his readers that the girl does not love Cross, but that he constantly indulges in "hoping" and "pretending" (3) in an effort to turn her imagined love into fact. O'Brien also says "she was a virgin," and then he follows this information with the qualifying remark that Cross "was almost sure" of this (3). On the next page, Cross becomes even more uncertain as he sits at "night and wonder[s] if Martha was a virgin" (4). Shortly after this, Cross wonders who took the pictures he now holds in his hands "because he knew she had boyfriends" (5), but O'Brien never says how Cross "knew" this. Then at the end of the chapter, after one of Cross's men has died because Cross has been too busy thinking of Martha, Cross sits at the bottom of his foxhole crying, not so much for the member of his platoon who has been killed, "but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, and because she was ... a poet and a virgin and uninvolved" (17).
This pattern of stating the facts about something and then quickly calling these facts into question that characterizes Jimmy Cross's thoughts in these opening pages is also characteristic of the way the narrator portrays events throughout this book. The facts about an event are given, and then they are quickly qualified or called into question. Then a new set of facts about the same subject emerges, which are again quickly called into question--and on and on, seemingly without end. For example, O'Brien catalogues the various weapons that the soldiers carried, even down to the weapons' weight, thus making them seem important in the sense that their protective power seems real. Several of these passages, however, are introduced by the fact that some of these same weapons were also carried by the character Ted Lavender, and each section of the first chapter (there are four in all) that explains what he carried is introduced by a qualifying phrase that reveals something about which Lavender himself was not at all certain when he was carrying his weapons: he did not know that his weapons would not protect him from ultimately getting shot and killed (4, 7, 10).
O'Brien's method in this book of trying to convey the average soldier's sense of uncertainty about what happened in Vietnam by presenting the "what-ifs" and "maybes" as if they were facts and then calling these facts back into question again, can be seen as a variation of that haunting phrase that was so often used by American soldiers to convey their own uncertainty about what happened in Vietnam: "there it is." Soldiers used this phrase to make the unspeakable and indescribable, the uncertain, very real and present for a fleeting moment. "There it is" would be uttered, for example, to affirm a ludicrous statement made about the horror of the war after someone had been killed. Similarly, O'Brien presents his readers with facts and stories in this book that are certain and real only for a moment because the strange "balance" in Vietnam between "crazy and almost crazy" (20) always creeps back in and forces the mind that is remembering and retelling a story to remember and retell it one more time in a different form, adding different nuances, and then to tell it one more time.
Storytelling in this book is thus something in which "the whole world is rearranged" (39) in an effort to get at the "full truth" (49) about events that themselves deny the possibility of arriving at something called the full, factual truth. By giving the reader facts and then calling those facts into question, and by telling stories and then saying that those stories happened (147), and then that they did not happen (203), and then that they might have happened (204), O'Brien puts even more emphasis in The Things They Carried on the question he poses in Going After Cacciato: namely, how can a work of fiction paradoxically become more real than the very real events upon which it is based, and how can the confusing experiences of the average soldier in Vietnam be conveyed so that they acquire at least a momentary sense of certainty?
In The Things They Carried, the conflict between fact and fiction is made an issue even before the book begins. The first thing to appear at the opening of this book is a reminder that "This is a work of fiction. Except a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary." Then, immediately after this, O'Brien says that "This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa." The six men named here, the reader discovers only a few pages later, are the book's main characters.
These prefatory comments force a reader to consider the fictional as real, since the book is dedicated to the characters who appear in it. O'Brien informs his readers at one point that his intention in telling these war stories is to get at the "full truth" (49) about them, and yet from the outset, he has already shown his readers that the full truth as he sees it is ambiguous: are these stories and their characters real or imaginary, or does the "truth" lie hovering somewhere between the two? A closer look at the book's narrative structure reveals that O'Brien is incapable of answering the questions he initially raises because the very act of writing fiction about the war, of telling war stories, as he practices it in The Things They Carried, is determined by the nature of the Vietnam war and ultimately by life where "the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity" (88).
The emphasis on ambiguity underlying O'Brien's narrative technique in The Things They Carried resembles the pattern used by Joseph Conrad's narrator, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, which J. Hillis Miller characterizes as a lifting of veils to reveal a truth that is quickly obscured again by the dropping of a new veil.⁸ Repeatedly, O'Brien says that he is telling "the full and exact truth" (181), yet as a reader makes his or her way through the book and gradually finds the same stories being retold with new facts and from a new perspective, it begins to become apparent that there is no such thing for O'Brien as the full and exact truth.
Repeating and varying the same stories in this manner is what O'Brien calls "Good Form" in the title of one of the chapters of The Things They Carried. The reason this is good form is that "telling stories" like this "can make things present" (204). The stories in this book are not somehow truer than the things that actually happened in Vietnam because they contain some higher, metaphysical truth: "True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstractions or analysis" (84). Rather, what makes these stories true is the impact they have as the events within them come alive for a reader. This approach to storytelling echoes Wolfgang Iser's theory of representation in his essay "Representation: A Performative Act." According to Iser,

Whatever shape or form these various [philosophical or fictional] conceptualizations [of life] may have, their common denominator is the attempt to explain origins. In this respect they close off those very potentialities that literature holds open. Of course literature also springs from the same anthropological need, since it stages what is inaccessible, thus compensating for the impossibility of knowing what it is to be. But literature is not an explanation of origins; it is a staging of the constant deferment of explanation, which makes the origin explode into its multifariousness.It is at this point that aesthetic semblance makes its full impact. Representation arises out of and thus entails the removal of difference, whose irremovability transforms representation into a performative act of staging something. This staging is almost infinitely variable, for in contrast to explanations, no single staging could ever remove difference and so explain origin. On the contrary, its very multiplicity facilitates an unending mirroring of what man is, because no mirrored manifestation can ever coincide with our actual being.⁹

From Iser's perspective, when people conceptualize life, they attempt to step outside themselves and look at who they are. And according to Iser, the reason people constantly make new attempts, through telling stories, at conceptualizing their lives and uncovering their true identities is that looking at who they might be is the closest they can to come to discovering who they actually are. Similarly, representing events in fiction is an attempt to understand them by detaching them from the "real world" and placing them in a world that is being staged. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien tries to make his readers believe that what they are reading is true because he wants them to step outside their everyday reality and participate in the events he is portraying. It is as if he wants his readers to believe in his stories to the point where they are virtually in them so that they might gain a more thorough understanding of, or feeling for, what is being portrayed in each story. Representation as O'Brien practices it in this book is not a mimetic act but a "game," a process of acting things out, as Iser also calls it in a more recent essay, "The Play of the Text":

Now since the latter [the text] is fictional, it automatically invokes a convention-governed contract between author and reader indicating that the textual world is to be viewed not as reality but as if it were reality. And so whatever is repeated in the text is not meant to denote the world, but merely a world enacted. This may well repeat an identifiable reality, but it contains one all-important difference: what happens within it is relieved of the consequences inherent in the real world referred to. Hence in disclosing itself, fictionality signalizes that everything is only to be taken as if it were what it seems to be, to be taken--in other words--as play.¹⁰

In The Things They Carried, representation includes staging what might have happened in Vietnam while simultaneously questioning the accuracy and credibility of the narrative act itself. The reader is thus made fully aware of the fact that s/he is being made a participant in a game, in a "performative act," while also being asked to become immediately involved in the incredibly frustrating act of trying to make sense of events that resist understanding. The reader is thus permitted to experience first hand the uncertainty that characterized being in Vietnam. O'Brien forces his readers to "believe" that the only "certainty" was the "overwhelming ambiguity" (79).
This process is nowhere clearer than in a chapter called "How to Tell a True War Story." O'Brien opens this chapter by telling his readers "THIS IS TRUE," and then he wanders through a series of variations of the story about how Curt Lemon stepped on a mine and was blown up into a tree. The only thing true or certain about the story, however, is that it is being constructed and then deconstructed and then reconstructed right in front of the reader. O'Brien gives six different versions of the story of how Curt Lemon was killed, and each version is so discomforting that it is difficult to come up with a more accurate statement to describe his senseless death than "there it is," or as O'Brien puts it in this chapter, "in the end, really there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe 'Oh'" (84).
Before a reader learns how Curt Lemon was killed in this chapter on how to tell a true war story, O'Brien first tells the "true" story that Rat Kiley apparently told to the character/narrator O'Brien about how Kiley wrote to Lemon's sister and "says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world" (76). Two months after Kiley has written this letter, he still has not heard from Lemon's sister, and so he writes her off as a "dumb cooze" (76). This is what happened according to Kiley, and O'Brien assures his readers that the story is "incredibly sad and true" (77). However, when Rat Kiley tells a story in another chapter the reader is warned that he "swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty. Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say" (101).
Rat Kiley is an unreliable narrator, and his facts are always distorted, but this does not affect storytelling truth as far as O'Brien is concerned. The above passage on Rat Kiley's credibility as a storyteller concludes with the statement that "It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt" (101). This summarizes O'Brien's often confusing narrative strategy in The Things They Carried: the facts about what actually happened, or whether anything happened at all, are not important. They cannot be important because they themselves are too uncertain, too lost in a world in which certainty has vanished somewhere between the "crazy and almost crazy." The important thing is that any story about the war, any "true war story," must "burn so hot" when it is told that it becomes alive for the listener/reader in the act of its telling.
In Rat Kiley's story about how he wrote to Curt Lemon's sister, for example, the details the reader is initially given are exaggerated to the point where, in keeping with O'Brien's fire metaphor, they begin to heat up. Curt Lemon, according to O'Brien, "would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years" (75). And once Lemon went fishing with a crate of hand grenades, "the funniest thing in world history ... about twenty zillion dead gook fish" (76). But the story does not get so hot that it burns, it does not become so "incredibly sad and true," as O'Brien puts it, until Rat tells the reader at the story's close that "I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back" (77). It is these words and not the facts that come before them that make the story true for O'Brien. These words make a reader feel Rat's loss and his anger.
At the beginning of this chapter, O'Brien asks his readers several times to "Listen to Rat," to listen more to how he says things than to what he is saying. And of all of the words that stand out in his story, it is the word "cooze" that makes his story come alive. "You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil" (76). This is just one of the many ways O'Brien gives for determining what constitutes a true war story in an unending list of possibilities that includes reacting to a story with the ambiguous words "Oh" and "There it is." Like these two phrases, Rat Kiley's word "cooze" is an attempt in an unending sequence of attempts to utter some truth about the Vietnam experience and, by extension, about war in general. There is no simplistic moral to be derived from this word, such as that war is obscene or corrupt. "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct" (76). There is simply the very real and true fact that the closest thing to certainty and truth in a war story as in life is a vague utterance, a punch at the darkness, an attempt to momentarily rip through the veil that repeatedly returns and covers the reality and truth of what actually happened.
It is thus no coincidence that right in the middle of this chapter on writing a true war story, O'Brien says that the main thing he can remember from the short time encompassing Lemon's death, "Even now, at this instant," is Mitchell Sanders's "yo-yo" (83). This toy can be seen as a metaphor for the playful act of narration that O'Brien practices in this book, a game that he plays by necessity. The only real way to tell a true war story, according to O'Brien, is to keep telling it "one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth" (91), which is ultimately impossible because the real truth, the full truth, as the events themselves, are lost forever in "a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent" (88). The only way to "tell a true war story" is "if you just keep on telling it" (91) because "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant" (89).
"How to Tell a True War Story" ends with the narrator's finally telling how he and Dave Jensen were ordered to climb up into a tree and remove the parts of Curt Lemon's body: "I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must've been the intestines" (89). He makes six attempts to tell this story before he can finally confront the "truth" as opposed to the mere facts of this story, and the "truth" of the story is that which speaks to a person's heart and stomach: "But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing 'Lemon Tree' as we threw down the parts." Important in this story, as in all of the stories in the book, is not what happened, but what might have happened.
Following the narrative technique of this book, a story's truth is clearly not something that can be distinguished or separated from a story, and the veracity or falseness of a story cannot be determined from a perspective outside the story. As Geoffrey Hartman says regarding poetry, "To keep a poem in mind is to keep it there, not to resolve it into available meanings."¹¹ Similarly, for O'Brien it is not the fact that a story actually happened that makes it true and worth remembering, any more than the story itself can be said to contain a final truth. The important thing is that a story becomes so much a part of the present that "there is nothing to remember except the story" (40). This is why O'Brien's narrator feels compelled to tell and then retell many variations of the same story over and over and over again. This is also why he introduces each new version of a story with such prefatory comments as "This one does it for me. I have told it before many times, many versions but here is what actually happened" (85). What actually happened, the story's truth, is contained in the way the story is told and in how it makes a reader feel--it must take a person beyond the mere facts. A story is true when it entertains, "but entertain in the highest way, entertain your brain and your stomach, and your heart, and your erotic zones, and make you laugh."¹²
There is nothing new in what O'Brien demonstrates here about trying to tell war stories--that the "truths" they contain "are contradictory" (87), elusive, and thus indeterminate. Two hundred years ago, Goethe also reflected on the same inevitable contradictions that arise when one speaks of what happened or might have happened in battle, when he tried to depict the senseless bloodshed during the allied invasion of revolutionary France in his autobiographical book Campaign in France; and, of course, Homer's Iliad is the primal statement on the contradictions inherent in war. However, what is new in O'Brien's approach to depicting war in The Things They Carried is that he makes the axiom that in war "Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true" (87) the basis for the act of telling a war story.
The narrative strategy that O'Brien uses in this book to portray the uncertainty of what happened in Vietnam is not restricted to depicting war, and O'Brien does not limit it to the war alone. The Things They Carried opens, as it closes, with a love story. The book also ends as it begins: with a man thinking of someone he loved in the past. Besides these two women, the reader is also introduced to the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, who is idealized and worshiped as are Martha in the first chapter and Linda in the last. There is also Henry Dobbin's girlfriend, whose nylon stocking continues to protect him even after he learns she has dumped him. In each of these instances, the reader is shown someone conjuring up memories of a person from the past and then telling themselves stories about that person. Moreover, the stories remembered and told in the chapters just mentioned are remembered and told precisely to make the present and future bearable and even possible. Storytelling, in short, becomes a means for survival in this book, much as it is in Going After Cacciato. When O'Brien tells the story of the death of Curt Lemon, for example, he informs his readers that this story "wasn't a war story. It was a love story" (90). As I said above, there are several other love stories in this book, and I would even argue that this entire book can be seen as a love story. It is O'Brien's expression of his love of storytelling as an act that can wrestle tolerable and meaningful truths from even the most horrible events.
O'Brien concludes his book with a chapter titled "The Lives of the Dead," in which he moves from Vietnam back to when he was nine years old. On the surface, the book's last chapter describes O'Brien's first date, with his first love, a girl named Linda who died of a brain tumor a few months after he had taken her to see the movie "The Man Who Never Was." What this chapter is really about, however, as its title suggests, is how the dead (which can also include people who may never have actually existed) can be given life in a work of fiction. In a story, O'Brien says, "memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness" (260). Like the man who never was in the film of that title, the people that never were except in memories and the imagination can become real or alive, if only for a moment, through the act of storytelling.
When you tell a story, according to O'Brien, "you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself" (178). And by doing this, you can externalize "a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse" (179). The storyteller does not, however, just escape from the events and people in a story by placing them on paper. The act of telling a given story is an ongoing and never-ending process. By constantly involving and then reinvolving the reader in the task of determining what "actually" happened in a given situation, in a story, and by forcing the reader to experience the impossibility of ever really knowing with any certainty what actually happened, O'Brien liberates himself from the lonesome responsibility of remembering and trying to understand events. He creates instead a community of individuals immersed in the act of experiencing the uncertainty of all events, regardless of whether these events occurred in Vietnam, in a small town in Minnesota, or somewhere in the reader's own life.
O'Brien thus saves himself, as he says in the last sentence of his book, from the fate of his character, Norman Bowker, who eventually kills himself in a chapter called "Speaking of Courage," because he cannot find some lasting meaning in the horrible things he experienced in Vietnam. O'Brien saves himself in that he demonstrates through the narrative strategy of this book that the most important thing is to be able to recognize and accept the fact that events have no fixed or final meaning and that the only meaning events can have at all is one which momentarily emerges, then shifts and changes each new time they come alive when they are being remembered and portrayed in stories.
Norman Bowker hangs himself in the locker room of the local YMCA after playing basketball with some friends (181), at least partially because he has a story locked up inside himself that he feels he cannot tell because no one would want to hear it. It is the story of how he failed to save his friend Kiowa from drowning in a field of human excrement: "A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, not for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds" (169).¹³ Bowker's dilemma is thus remarkably similar to that of Hemingway's character Krebs in the story "Soldier's Home." Neither of these men returning from war can tell his story: "At first Krebs ... did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities."¹⁴
O'Brien, on the other hand, took on the task after his war "of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to" him (179). What he explains in The Things They Carried is that it is impossible to know "exactly what had happened." What he wants his readers to know are all the things he/they/we did not know about Vietnam and will probably never know. And what he wants his readers to feel in the deepest part of their stomachs is the sense of uncertainty his character/narrator Tim O'Brien experiences twenty years after the war when he returns to the place where his friend Kiowa sank into a "field of shit" and tries to find "something meaningful and right" (212) to say. Ultimately he can only say, "well ... there it is" (212). Each time a reader of The Things They Carried returns to Vietnam through O'Brien's labyrinth of stories, he or she will become increasingly aware of the fact that this statement is the closest one can probably ever come to knowing the "real truth," the undying uncertainty of the Vietnam War.

Notes

1. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: Morrow, 1985) 142-43.
2. David Halberstram, One Very Hot Day (New York: Houghton, 1967) 127.
3. Philip Beidler, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982) 4.
4. Timothy J. Lomperis, Reading the Wind: The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke UP, 1989) 87.
5. Lomperis 87.
6. The reviewers of The Things They Carried are pretty much split on whether to call it a novel or a collection of short stories. When I asked Tim O'Brien in an interview in July 1992 what he felt was the most adequate designation, he said that the book is neither a collection of stories nor a novel: he prefers to call it simply "a work of fiction." One of the best discussions of the uniqueness of this book appeared in a review in the Minneapolis Star: "O'Brien is inventing a form here. His book evokes the hyperintense personal journalism of Michael Herr and the journalism-as-novel of Norman Mailer, but it is a different animal. It is fiction, even though its main character has the same name as the author. It is nonfiction, even though Tim O'Brien did not exactly throw the grenade that mangled the slim, dainty young man in black pajamas. It is a confession, but even as he cringes over the doubt and cowardice attributed to Tim O'Brien, the reader must carefully remember Tim O'Brien is a device. ... The Things They Carried defies classification, which won't hurt its survival chances. ... If I had to label it, I'd call it an epic prose poem of our time, deromanticizing and demystifying and yet singing the beauty and mystery of human life over its screams and explosions, curses and lies." Dan Carpenter, "Author Brings Reality to Vietnam War Story," Minneapolis Star and Tribune 12 Mar. 1990 NewsBank, "Literature," 1985, microfiche).
7. Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton, 1990) 7. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses.
8. J. Hillis Miller, "Heart of Darkness Revisited," Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin's, 1989) 158.
9. Wolfgang Iser, "Representation: A Performative Act," Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 245.
10. Iser, "The Play of the Text," Prospecting 251.
11. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980) 224.
12. Tim O'Brien, interview, in Steven Kaplan, "An Interview with Tim O'Brien," Missouri Review 14.3 (1991): 106.
13. In the chapter following "Speaking of Courage," which O'Brien simply calls "Notes," he typically turns the whole story upside down "in the interest of truth" and tells us that Norman Bowker was not responsible for Kiowa's horrible death: "That part of the story is my own" (182). This phrase could be taken to mean that this part of the story is his own creation or that he was the one responsible for Kiowa's death.
14. Ernest Hemingway, "Soldier's Home," The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribners, 1953) 145.

Source Citation

Kaplan, Steven. "The Things They Carried." Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 169-192. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420063944&v=2.1&u=maco12153&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

Article #1: "A Conversation With Tim O'Brien"

Title: A Conversation with Tim O'Brien

Author(s): Tim O'Brien and Patrick Hicks

Publication Details: Indiana Review 27.2 (Winter 2005): p85-95.

Source: Short Story Criticism.

.

Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 123. Detroit: Gale. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay, Interview

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2009 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(interview date March 2004) In this interview, which took place in March, 2004, Hicks and O'Brien discuss the author's life and writings, focusing on The Things They Carried, which O'Brien regards as a work about the nature of truth and about storytelling itself.]
I picked him up at the regional airport in Sioux Falls. It was a muggy day in late April, but I knew that Tim O'Brien was used to such weather because he grew up only fifty miles east of here, in Worthington, Minnesota. It must have been a bittersweet return for him because it was here that he was inducted into the Army. It was here that he spent a sleepless night in a YMCA with other recruits, and it was here--at the very same airport that he had just flown into--that he was loaded onto a plane and taken to Fort Lewis for basic training. This small city in South Dakota is where Tim O'Brien abandoned his civilian life, and began his long journey into Vietnam.
O'Brien never intended to fight in the Vietnam War. In fact, after graduating summa cum laude from Macalester College in May 1968, he planned to do post-graduate work at Harvard. Instead, he was assigned to the Quang Ngai Province of Vietnam where he received the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, and the Combat Infantryman's Badge. He was honorably discharged in March 1970 with the rank of sergeant. After returning to the States he picked up where he left off and went to Harvard, he worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post, and he wrote his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone (1973). This searing indictment against the war brought him immediate attention and catapulted his literary career. His subsequent novels include: Northern Lights (1975), Going after Cacciato (1978), The Nuclear Age (1985), The Things They Carried (1990), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), Tomcat in Love (1998), and July, July (2002). He has won the National Book Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, the O. Henry Award, and he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ever since he started writing three decades ago, it has become impossible to discuss contemporary American fiction without mentioning his name.
I met him at Joe Foss Airfield on April 28, 2004. He was dressed in a yellow sweater, ratty jeans, a tan baseball cap, and white sneakers. As soon as we stepped outside into the heat, he lit up a cigarette and squinted at the sky. Tim O'Brien is immediately friendly, very open, and it is easy to laugh with him.
We drove towards his hotel and as we stopped for coffee I asked about his health. Unknown to virtually everyone, he had been inadvertently poisoning himself from December to late March of 2004. Mysterious sores had spread over his entire body, pus and blood oozed from his limbs in frightening quantity, and he lost twenty-eight pounds in one month. He was so weak that he was confined to a wheelchair. Specialists informed him that he probably had liver cancer. He drew up a will, and prepared for the worst.
It turned out to be a vitamin supplement called Niacin. O'Brien had been ordered to take it for his cholesterol, but the dosage was so high that it was damaging his liver. Once the Niacin was reduced, he began to heal almost immediately. The sores dried up into scars, and the doctors ordered him to eat plenty of ice-cream so that he would gain weight.
When I asked if he felt like he had a new lease on life, he smiled widely and nodded. It's little wonder he feels this way because much has changed for Tim O'Brien. Aside from moving to Texas and being granted a clean bill of health, he became a father for the first time in 2003. He's also hard at work on a new novel, which is about a reporter who returns from the Dutch East Indies. This character flies into Los Angeles, meets a sickly woman and ... that's about all he knows at the moment. He says that the terror attacks of September 11 will work their way into the narrative, but he's not sure how yet.
We talked in a hotel that was on the edge of the prairie. Cigarette smoke threaded its way towards the ceiling as we spoke about Minnesota, his latest novel, Vietnam, magic, and the threat of terrorism.
[Hicks]: How, if at all, do you think that growing up in Minnesota affected your writing?
[O'Brien]: In two ways for sure. The settings for many of my books are located in Minnesota. Even in a book like The Things They Carried, although a good portion of it happens in Vietnam, the main character is from Minnesota. Northern Lights, Minnesota. In the Lake of the Woods, Minnesota. July, July, Minnesota. The book I'm working on now, one of the main characters is from Minnesota. It's a way for me to ground the characters in a physical space with which I'm familiar. It means I don't have to do research. It means I know things intuitively where I would have to otherwise look it up. Secondly though, and much more importantly, is the diction with which the books are written. I write--I try to write--in a natural style which for me is born in a place like Worthington or Austin. People in Minnesota talk briskly, efficiently, and at times in grunts. [Laughs]. I like writing that way.
Is Minnesota your version of Yoknapatawpha County?
No, not in that grand a sense. It's more of a psychological background and a linguistic background. Minnesotans speak--maybe all Midwesterners speak--with a certain hubris. They're proud of themselves, but they do it in a neat little way. There's a semi-laughing slyness with which Midwesterners speak, as if they know more than they're going to let on in a conversation. Garrison Keillor, as you know, is a master of this in his humor. I was born and bred in this country so I don't want to write like someone from Philadelphia or Texas or LA. I want to write from my heart, which has to do with my roots.
You wrote a novel while you were a student at Macalester College or, more precisely, when you visited Czechoslovakia with SPAAN (Student Project for Amenity Among Nations). What was that novel about?
[Surprised] I really don't remember much about it. It had to do with what was going on in Czechoslovakia at the time, which was the beginning of the revolution. I was there in 1967. It was about the yearning to be free of the shackles of tyranny and autocracy. It had a thriller surface to it but I can't remember the plot. That was a long time ago but I do remember that it was not good, that part I do remember. But I also remember that it was good to try. It was my first try at writing a full novel and it was abysmal. It didn't get published, and that was good, because I learned how hard it is to write a decent book. It's good to learn that sort of thing early on in your life.
I know that you have great affection for your alma mater.
Yes. Very much so.
What role, if any, did Macalester College have in shaping you as a writer?
It shaped my liberal arts background and being. Because of Macalester I'm an eclectic reader. I always read from the time I was a little kid but I didn't read eclectically, widely, or across a variety of subjects. Because of Macalester I'll read a book on psychology and a book on history and others on economics. Prior to Macalester I'd read deeply and narrowly about things that I cared about, and Macalester taught me to broaden my caring. It's made me not only a better writer but a better citizen. To be that way, you really have to read widely and not scoff at things that on the surface you may not be interested in. For example, I took a course on astronomy, a subject which I thought would be thoroughly boring. But I found myself not only fascinated by cosmology, but fascinated by the religious issues that are born out of that. Where do we come from? Where do we go? What if we live in a collapsing universe? What if we don't and the universe keeps expanding and we turn into protons and subprotons and quarks? Which future is better? What began as a course became a scientific interest, became a philosophic interest, and to this day when I run across a book on cosmology that isn't mathematically inaccessible I'll still read it.
Although Vietnam is the center of gravity for much of your fiction, your themes move far beyond warfare and penetrate deeply into the mysteries of the human experience. In spite of this, do you sometimes feel pigeonholed as a war writer?
I don't have many feelings about it unless I'm asked. If somebody asks me then I've got to come up with an answer. In a way it's flattering to be thought of as a spokesman for people who have gone through this terrible experience. In a way it's frustrating but only when I stop to think about it. When I think about The Things They Carried or Cacciato or In the Lake of the Woods, which are three books that have a lot of Vietnam in them, they're so different as books that it's hard to take seriously the Vietnam part. In the Lake of the Woods occurs after Vietnam and living with the consequences of history and misdeed and horror. Cacciato is a fabulist running-away-from-the-war story. The Things They Carried is a book largely about storytelling and issues about truth. It has as much to do with epistemology as it does with the war. So, I don't take seriously the Vietnam thing. I think if I were a James Webb or a Philip Caputo I'd probably take it more seriously. But because I'm not of the literary world, and I don't travel in literary circles, I don't hear it much. I sit in my underwear and write my books and my wife doesn't pigeonhole me [Laughs]. I just don't hear it much.
One of the most powerful stories in The Things They Carried is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." I can see the cheerleader, Mary Anne Bell, as a Kurtz figure, but what was the genesis of this story? Apparently it's based on a real incident?
It's based on a real recounting of a sighting. I was told when I arrived in Vietnam that a young high school girl had been to the Song Tra Bong, a Green Beret camp, which is a real place. Then I heard it from another guy, and another guy, and I heard it--I don't know--twelve times. None of them had ever seen her. They'd just heard the story themselves. Then I came back to the States and heard it some more from people who were actually at the camp as Green Berets. They said it with some authenticity and a look in their eyes which made me think that they weren't making it up. So I heard all these anecdotes about a young woman coming over to Vietnam and like most readers of the story I just shrugged it off and thought that just couldn't have happened. Then when I thought seriously about doing a story, I had to ask myself why I didn't believe it. Logistically it was wholly believable. All you had to do was buy a plane ticket and fly from Cleveland to LA to Bangkok to Saigon. There was nothing to prevent civilians from coming into the country. And there were many civilians there. I mean, there were lots of them. More than has been written about. Everything from hippies traveling through the country to secretaries for contractors to doughnut dollies to nurses to journalists. There were really lots of civilians and women in Vietnam. So the story didn't seem quite as impossible to me when I began thinking about it seriously. The only thing that really stops a person from believing the story is gender. Could a woman be sucked into war the way that a man could be? Then issues of gender began to interest me. If it weren't for the conventions of our society where men, by and large, fill combatant roles, the same thing that happened to me could happen to a woman. There have been societies where women have served in combat roles.
We only need to think of Joan of Arc, or Queen Boadicea of the Iceni. She was certainly a challenge for the Romans.
Yes, absolutely, there's a good example. Women are capable of violence. We know that from reading history. Lizzy Borden, Elizabeth, and we could go on about women who are less than peaceable in their nature. For me it's a story ultimately meant to bridge a gap--a gap of literature--because women sometimes say, "I don't want to read a war story, I don't like them, it's a foreign experience to me, I'll never have to go through anything like it." And what happens in the story is essentially what I went through. Coming over naïve and romantic and full of ideals about oneself and being really altered, irretrievably, just by proximity to violence. I can't prove the story, but I've heard it from so many people that I think that it probably is true.
I notice in The Things They Carried that you obviously have these moments of horror, but it's also quite funny at times. Really funny.
Good, good. I'm pleased you noticed that.
Given that then, what do you think the role of the storyteller is in society?
It's very important to me when I'm writing tragedy to have humor in it, and vice-versa. The world is not uni-dimensional. It's not all sad or all happy. I remember reading Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl's book, and Primo Levi on the concentration camps, and even their humor was a way of coping and dealing with the world--it's called gallows humor. It was rampant in Vietnam. I'm sure it's rampant in cancer wards, bad marriages, wherever horror strikes, and human beings are capable of laughing at it, responding to it, dealing with it. The truth of the role, my role, is to tell a good story. It's not that simple, but in a way it is that simple. If the story isn't gripping to me as the author, whatever message I might have is lost. It will turn into abstraction and proselytizing, which is not what fiction is for. Fiction is simply there for the purpose of story. And by story I don't mean just plot. I mean human beings behaving in a world of situational ethics. That person jumps off a ship because he thinks it's going to sink, and it doesn't. How do you live with yourself? That act of cowardice makes Lord Jim. A whole novel ensues from that, a big fat one, of a man running from his misdeed and trying to deal with it.
Raising questions, I think, is absolutely crucial to good storytelling. You may not feel that you have something to teach your readers, but do feel that your readers want to learn something from your novels?
I think they hope they will, but that hope is frustrated in all my books by my adamant refusal to fulfill that need. In the Lake of the Woods is an example where there is hope that I'm going to solve this mystery for people. My personality is such that I don't see that as my role. My role is not to solve mysteries, but to expand them. To make them bigger. To ultimately make readers think of their lives in terms of ambiguity. It's the human condition and we're uncertain about almost everything. Am I going to be alive tomorrow? I don't know. Where will I go if I'm not alive? Will I go to heaven or hell or is there someplace in-between? We don't know and most of the disciplines of the world are there to give us hints of certainty. Science is organized that way. Houses are built so that you are a little more certain that you won't freeze to death. The world is organized, but fiction is different. Fiction is there to open up the door. I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, I don't know why I jumped off that ship, why I went to that war, why I married that woman. I don't know why I'm going to rob that bank. There's a book I read when I was a kid by John Steinbeck called The Winter of Our Discontent. It's about this middle-aged man who robs a bank next door in a small town. He didn't know why he was doing it, he was just discontent. I try to write books that don't pretend to give answers. I couldn't write, for example, The DaVinci Code because it's not my take on how the world is, that there's this code which will resolve who Christ was. The mystery of it all is what intrigues me. I want to enhance the mystery and deepen it.
That's one of the ironies, I suppose, of being in Vietnam because one of the certainties you saw was the outcome of hatred or, at the very least, not being able to understand the other side. What did you learn about hatred in Vietnam?
I learned how powerful a force it is. [Pauses]. How people come to hate things ... they don't even know what it is they're hating. The Viet Cong were hated by my fellow soldiers and the Vietnamese in general were hated for their foreignness. We couldn't understand their language, their culture, their religion. It was all beyond us. No one knew the first thing about anything except that everybody was dying, usually from landmines and booby-traps and quick little firefights. You couldn't even see the enemy and therefore the enemy became even more hated. Who were they? Where were they? It was like hating a ghost. It's like being haunted and you're getting blown up, but there are no front lines and there are no enemy soldiers in uniforms. As a consequence, if you took sniper fire you'd just step back and you'd waste a village. Just call in gunships or artillery and the whole village would disappear. Not just the enemy, but the chickens and the dogs and the pigs and the little girls and little boys and the teenagers and the old men. They would all fry. It all became the enemy. Vietnam became the enemy. The whole place became the enemy.
The only certainty was the uncertainty of the place.
Yes, exactly, that's a line out of The Things They Carried. There's some truth about that because your values are changed by war. What was once wrong--killing people--now becomes sanctioned murder. Civility and savagery change places. All your values go upside down, and what you were certain about on the prairies of southern Minnesota change when you get into this heart of darkness called Vietnam. Everything you grew up believing in--politicians don't lie, you must be patriotic--it all gets turned upside down.
Just like Alice in Wonderland.
It really felt that you'd gone through the looking glass.
You have commented in the past that Curt Lemon's sudden death in The Things They Carried is based upon the death of your friend, Chip Merricks. Would you mind describing what he was like as your friend, as a human being, so that we can see him a bit better?
Sure, sure. I can say things about him but of course I can never bring him alive for you. He was a slender, hip-talking, young black kid in his early twenties from Orlando, Florida. I first met him when we were assigned to the same foxhole one night in my platoon. We'd be sharing the same foxhole which meant that he'd be awake for two hours while I slept, and then I'd take over while he slept. So we spent our first night keeping each other alive and trusting each other. That's how our friendship was born. It was born in a life and death trust. It was instantaneous. He didn't fall asleep. I didn't fall asleep. I can't say we become close friends right away because it took about a month of that first night repeating itself in different kinds of ways in combat. Then his humor began to come out. I've got pictures--or had pictures of us together, someone else has them now--of us laughing together. We wrote letters to each other's sisters. We didn't talk about the black/white chasm, which was really pronounced in both America and Vietnam. We talked through it or around it. It was there as a subject, but we didn't want to address it probably because it would wreck our friendship. We became visceral friends and I think that we would have remained friends too. It was that kind of friendship. When he died, he was the one person in my company who I felt really--he was my friend--and to have that one person die was horrible, horrible.
Just to change the pace a bit: there are times when the shadow of Joyce and Borges seem to hover on the fringes of your work--I'm thinking about "How to Tell a True War Story," the news clippings which you fabricate in In the Lake of the Woods, and the numerous footnotes in Tomcat--has Joyce influenced your work at all?
Yes. The same with Borges and Marquez, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway. Fowles too, The French Lieutenant's Woman and parts of The Magus especially. Equally feeding into these influences are things from childhood like fairy tales. In my books the dead will sit up and talk and that comes from fairy tales where these things can happen. My best work is always set outdoors, not indoors. My best writing happens when the doors open and the characters are outside. Why that is, I don't know, but I think it has to do with childhood reading where I was enamored with outdoor stories. There was a series called The Young Pioneers by Joseph Altsheler and my Dad put me on to it. I guess it was big in the 20s. He wrote a series about the Civil War too. I can't remember the name of it, but he wrote a total of thirty books and I read them all. And the Hardy Boys. These were not closed room stories and, to this day, it's very hard for me to work with characters when doors are around them. I don't know what it is, but it closes me up. I like moving through the outdoors because it opens up possibilities for human behavior.
I want to talk about this idea of opening up possibilities in the physical world. I know that as a child you dappled with magic.
I still do. [Laughs]
And not just in the physical sense I think, because you manipulate reality through your fiction. In particular, you write about deception and lies. What role do you think illusion plays in writing?
It's essential to all fiction because it's illusion, it's not really happening, it's made up. As with a magic act, the reader knows it's made up. You begin a novel knowing that it's invented and that the characters aren't real. It's the same with a magic act. You know that lion hasn't really vanished into thin air, it just seems that way. With an act of magic or a good novel you suspend disbelief. So, if I'm reading--I don't know--The Sun Also Rises, I see Jake and Lady Brett in a taxi-cab, it's so well done and the art is so perfect that there's nothing in the way of surrendering to the illusion of it all. The same goes with magic. If it's done artfully, which means not as a trick, a good magic act flows. The dove turns into a rabbit, and the rabbit jumps up and goes into the lap of the audience, and takes a card out of the pocket of the audience, and brings it back to the magician, and it's the card that an hour earlier he made vanish.
It's the story. That unbroken illusion that mesmerizes the audience. As with good writing, the tricks become more important than the magician on the stage.
Yes. It's all wrapped together. One thing leads into another and these are the principles that used to apply to magic. By that I mean one-hundred and fifty years ago when real magicians were doing theater magic, it was an evening of connection where everything was married to everything else. This often was done by magicians who didn't speak a word; it was just body language and the flow of one object into another. But the principles of fiction and magic are very similar for the building of illusion. That's what dialogue is for. It gives the illusion of somebody talking. That's what description is for because it gives the reality and smell of a place. Even though you're not really in that moldy and dank basement you feel as if you are by the word "moldy" and the word "dank." Then you try to find words that aren't even moldy and dank, but objects like "algae," and then you don't even have to use the word "moldy."
This sense of illusion and searching for meaning, I see this most vividly when I think of In the Lake of the Woods because the reader has to search through the narrative to find meaning and truth to it all. How do you think that love and trust can operate after a traumatic experience like war? What about a love affair in jeopardy, which is exactly what John and Kathy Wade experience in In the Lake of the Woods?
It's difficult to trust once that trust has been betrayed. In a way it's not healthy to have absolute and abiding trust in everything and everyone. Americans are often taught that it's good to trust everything, but sometimes it's healthy not to. Sometimes it's healthy to have a little distrust of the world, including of oneself. One of the things that you learn as you go through life is that you're not always capable of being a good person or of doing the decent and right thing. We have moments when we're not ourselves. It's good to have a sense of knowledge of the entirety of the human spirit. Most human beings are capable of decency and goodness, and also capable of indecency and real nastiness. You don't have to be a Hitler or a saint. Most of us are in between. My books are always about people who are capable of great good, but also capable of barbarity too. Unfortunately that's who we are as human beings. [Pauses] Or maybe fortunately? It would be very boring to walk through life as a saint and then to be surrounded by other absolute utter saints. It would be like living in--it would be like living in the Partridge Family. [Laughs] I'd rather be in one of those uglier families on TV, just as a matter of interest.
In regards to this sort of psychological terrain in your novels, is there a particular book of yours that you wished received more critical and popular attention?
[Long pause] No. I don't really think about those things. There are aspects of all my books, including the ones that have been wildly popular, that I wish people would notice more. This is also true for things that got less popular acclaim. It's not a matter of the popularity. It's a matter of working, for example, hard on one sentence. You know, your secret thought is, "boy this is a great sentence on that page." And you know why you love it, and you want to hear somebody else talk about it. Once in a blue moon, a student or a teacher or someone that I'll meet along the road of life will mention that sentence or paragraph, and that one mention is sufficient to justify the whole enterprise. When you write a sentence or a paragraph or a page that you feel genuinely giddy about, it's about beauty. You say to yourself, "well, I don't know how I did it," and you don't even take credit for it. It's not you, you just love the thing. Maybe it's like a child? You're aware that you are a part of the creation but you're just so giddy at its beauty.
Your two most recent novels--Tomcat in Love and July, July--deal very much with contemporary American society and gender issues. More specifically, how have women's issues influenced your writing?
In the same way the war did or childhood. I've lived a life and because I've lived a life I know loss, and betrayal, and hurt, and joy. All those things that everybody's felt. I wanted to address those things through the lens of comedy so I wrote Tomcat in Love. I wanted to write about a really despicable sexist guy, but I also wanted it to be really funny. Because Clinton, upon whom the character is kind of based, struck me as funny at times. He's a smart guy, and I liked his politics, but he was a liar and a deceiver of the American people and of his own family. I wanted to get inside somebody like that and ask questions like: How did he get to be that way? And what would it be like to live inside that skin? Take the book I'm writing now; I'm inside the head of a character that's not me. Actually, I'm more of an observer of this character and yet the closer I get to him--just in terms of physic distance--the more intrigued I get, like with Clinton. I guess I need this sense of intrigue in all my books. This is true of John Wade. I didn't know him well and wondered who was this magician, liar, secret-keeper, politician, possible murderer? I know things about him, but I don't know him. The characters that most intrigue me are characters like Lady Macbeth. How did she get to be that way? We'll never know, but you get close enough to feel the vibrations coming off the character. That's what I love about fiction.
We talked early today about the current novel that you're writing. You've got this character coming from Southeast Asia and he lands in Los Angeles, where he meets a sickly woman. How did you come up with these particular scenes?
Part of it is just interest in the world. I've never been to Indonesia and I want to go there, and I will sometime and look around to get the feel of the place. Similarly, this guy is from Santa Monica and while I've been there once, I've never lived there. It's a way of imagining yourself living in another world. There's going to be a Minnesota connection in the book of course, but this guy's home is Santa Monica, a place of the boardwalk, and muscle beach, and movie stars, and poverty. I was intrigued by the place in the way that Vietnam intrigued me. It seems so foreign. The people have their skateboards and their roller-blades and their hard midriffs. They all look beautiful, as if they've come out of a cookie-cutter. I wondered what it would be like to grow up as a middle-class kid with all this tempting wealth and fame surrounding you and making you feel inferior. It seemed like a neat background for a character to grow up in, a place where you're living amid the kind of the people that you can't be. It must hurt. It must cause psychological damage. I want to write about the consequences and the adulthood of where that damage would take you and how you'd compensate for it. What are the risks you'd take, and the things you'd do to aspire to that life? It would be like looking at a candy store through a window. I'd gone out to Santa Monica for a table reading for the script of Going after Cacciato, which was going to be made into a movie, and I went to this place called Shutters which is a famous hotel. There in this room--which was twice, maybe three times, the size of this hotel room we're in--was John Voight, and Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey McGuire. These were people that I'd seen on the screen, and I felt something of what my character felt. I felt ... [Pauses]
Alienated?
Yes, I felt excluded from this whole world of fame and huge amounts of money and physical beauty. This is not my province. I'm from Worthington, Minnesota, and I always will be. They're not. They're of Hollywood.
This is very interesting, I think. Like Hemingway, many of your stories deal with courage, or sometimes the lack thereof, but you also remind me of that sense of loss and coping and of extreme wealth that we find in Fitzgerald. Both of these writers are from the Midwest of course. Do you see any connection? Is this a Midwestern thing?
I think it is partly a Midwestern thing. There's a yearning for the other side of the fence. Not that the grass is greener, but golder. It's got a glitter and a fantasy potential to it that Gatsby aspired to. For a writer who grew up in the Midwest it's not just tempting material, it's necessary material for me to write about. I remember as a kid growing up in Worthington that I was just dying to get out of the place. I was fed up with Kiwanis clubs and

Main Street

and Rotary boys. Everyone knew everybody else and there were no secrets. I hated it, really hated it. I had a yearning for--I don't know what exactly--but it was gold and glittery and there was anonymity around it. I still dream about islands where no one can get at me. I think that is a Midwestern small town desire to get away from the cloistered feel of it all.
But yet we feel alienated and lost when we do get to the larger city.
Yeah, as all the characters do. Yes, that's the sad end to all of these stories.
You recently became a father for the first time and I'm curious to know how fatherhood has changed your perception on life or writing.
[Laughs] All the clichés are true. You come to value something more than you value yourself. It seemed impossible that nine months ago anything would replace writing as the center of my life, but it has. You're filled with fears for the world that before were abstract, like terrorism and anthrax. I fear for the world.
Is this why September 11 is going to be a part of your new novel?
We live in an age with the proliferation of biological and chemical weapons and on every corner there is an evil lurking, and I fear for my son's future. In a way, I didn't fear for myself so much, even in Vietnam, as I fear for what's in store for my kid of nine months. I'm writing about 9/11 in my new novel because it's more than just a political threat or the world blowing up or New York collapsing. It has more to do with the future of the human being in my life now. It makes me want to write about it.

Source Citation

O'Brien, Tim, and Patrick Hicks. "A Conversation with Tim O'Brien." Indiana Review 27.2 (Winter 2005): 85-95. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 123. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420091471&v=2.1&u=maco12153&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w