If I had written this post last week, it might have turned out like a rant. I wasn’t flat out angry, but I definitely felt some type of emotion (maybe the crossroads between feeling betrayed and disappointed) whenever O’Brien would tell a gripping story and then reveal a few chapters later that he made it up in the name of truth. I think I was extra confused because one of my favorite genres of books are (auto)biographies and I’d never doubted the facts in those books (I know this book says fiction on the front, but the combination of the fact that O’Brien actually fought in the Vietnam War and his emphasis on truthfulness from the start made me approach this book with the mindset of an autobiography). I didn’t think of myself as gullible but I began questioning whether I had been naive while reading biographies all my life.
What was truth?
What was real?
And honestly why did it matter to me so much?
In “How to tell a true war story” O’Brien says, “and in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’ (74). We talked about this sentence in class and came to the conclusion that war is greatly mythicized and that O’Brien didn’t want us trying to get too much out of each story. And then when we were discussing “Notes” and “Good form”, someone brought up this question- are we trying to glorify the war stories when we are so upset that O’Brien isn’t telling us the perfect, true facts?
After mulling over that question, I decided that the reason I liked biographies was because they were oftentimes about people whose lives were vastly different than mine and without much insight on their lifestyle, I gave them full license to convince me of anything about their lives. As I read their story, I felt like I was learning so much about a life I would never live and vicariously experiencing events that I may never get to face. I inadvertantly idolized the subjects because of their extensive knowledge about a life I did not know.
I made the mistake of approaching O’Brien’s novel in the same manner. I was curious about war stories because war was something I had never experienced and knew little about. I expected O’Brien to give me the facts, portray it in a way that was not completely foreign to me, and all I had to do was believe and be impressed. After reading “On the Rainy River,” I began to idolize Tim. Though he said, “I am a coward. I went to war,” I was just impressed with the idea that he could go to war, something I don’t think I could ever handle (58). He wasn’t brave enough to be true to himself but he was able to choose to put himself in a dangerous and stressful war zone, and I began to focus his stories under the lens that I would never be brave enough to experience them myself.
Which unfortunately is exactly what I think O’Brien doesn’t want. He doesn’t want us to glorify war. “The war wasn’t all terror and violence,” (30). “Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories too, and even a few peace stories,” (33). O’Brien’s goal is for us to experience all the feelings of war, instead of mindlessly listening to major stories and feeling impressed or awestruck. Because the war can have mundane moments and quiet moments and those play a role in the war experience just like major deaths or attacks do. To only want to hear crazy war stories is to loose the depth of this novel and a depth of understanding about war. To pigeonhole war into just specific events and become obsessed with extrapolating every little detail is to miss the point. We can’t read this like a biography and get angry about the disparity of facts and the revelations that some stories aren’t exactly true. So it shouldn’t matter exactly how many kids O’Brien had (if any) or how many men he physically killed in Vietnam (if any). Counting numbers and trying to memorize the “fabula” of the war stories doesn’t work because as stated in class, “fabula” doesn’t exist without “sjuzet”. And under that idea, we must accept and comply with O’Brien’s choice of storytelling. We weren’t in the Vietnam War so we’ll never know exactly what’s true. But this book might be the closest experience we’ll ever get.
