I've always felt when it comes to war stories, the most important aspect was factual truth. I thought real soldiers and veterans would be disgusted with people writing imitation experiences so I was really surprised to see that Fire and Forget is comprised of fictional stories from actual people involved in Iraq & Afghanistan. Now, as we finish up The Things They Carried, I can definitely say I was wrong.
Interspersed among the story chapters are the ones where Tim O'Brien breaks the literary fourth wall to tell us about his writing. "How To Tell a True War Story," "Notes," and "Good Form" all discuss the meaning of truth in the context of war. In "How to Tell a True War Story," O'Brien essentially states that the purpose of a war story is not to convey a message or moral but to invoke a genuine, significant feeling or emotion. In "Notes," he reveals that he took a "true" story from one of his friends and edited to fit a storyline in his book only to realize that it wasn't right. In "Good Form," we learn that O'Brien didn't actually kill anyone so "The Man I Killed" reflects on how he felt as if he had killed the soldier. He explains that there are two types of truth: story and happening. Story truth is far more important for war stories.
In short, a "true" war story is one that incorporates false factual information to give the overall story more truth. Now the question is how does the authenticity of the stories affect your impressions of them? Part of me wishes O'Brien had cut out all of his analysis and let us wonder which stories were real and which weren't while the other part is glad to get some insight and background knowledge on them. What do you think?
I'm not sure about your definition of "true war story". Although a true war story certainly can incorporate some false bits in order to improve it, I wouldn't consider it necessary. For O'Brien's stories, the question of what's true does play a large role, and the crux of one story, but I would still call a barebones facts description of battle a "true war story". The last question of letting us guess whether stories are true are not doesn't play a big role for me, because that's never been a big part of my reading.
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ReplyDeleteAr first, I really did not want to believe the stories that O'Brien told because I didn't know how much of them were factually accurate, and which were added for the effect of the story. But after reading "How to Tell a True War Story," I started to just read the stories and not let myself think about what was true and what wasn't. I tried to just take everything in as a big picture and just get an overall feeling from the story. I feel like that big picture and feeling is a true impression of the war and maybe what Tim O'Brien was going for.
ReplyDeleteBut would we even have asked the question, if O'Brien's narrator didn't explicitly bring it up? In our discussion of the first Salinger story, no one made any mention of what in the story might be factual or fictional, or drawn from Salinger's experience. We read it as a self-contained, tightly structured story. O'Brien likely could have gotten away with writing solely more traditional war narratives, without the book questioning its own status, but he seems deliberately interested in getting us to think about the process a writer goes through when turning his or her own experience into fiction. The timing of this book was intentionally placed near the time when you all were developing your own short stories for a reason.
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