ENG 102 Portfolio: "Live Essay"

Truth v. Fiction

The stories in Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried deal with the character Tim O’Brien and his experiences with the Vietnam War and its draft. The author and the character are not the same person despite the fact that they have the same name. However, we know for a fact that the author served in the Vietnam War as did the character. So after reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and knowing that he served in the Vietnam War, it becomes evident that this could complicate his discussion of truth versus fiction in the text. In an article talking about Tim O’Brien’s writing, Adam Frost considers O’Brien’s books to be “clear-eyed but complex accounts of his own experiences in the battle zone. Although his work is essentially reportage, he also uses several fictional techniques to bind and energize his narratives” (Frost). O’Brien’s experiences in the Vietnam War could have easily affected the difference between truth and fiction in his writing because O’Brien could have potentially incorporated real moments into fictional stories or fictional moments into real stories.

How exactly can a person distinguish between what is truth and what is fiction? In Tim O’Brien’s, The Things They Carried, the line between what is truth and what is fiction can get a little blurry. His own experiences could and did have an impact on what happened in the story. In an interview with O’Brien he said, “…There was an intersection of values, of what was and what was to come, that I’ll always go back to, even though the stories are almost all invented, even the Vietnam stuff”(qtd. inChen 80). The key word is almost. Almost is admitting that there was an outside influence from what he himself experienced in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien books always have something to do with Vietnam because that is what he knows. That is what he remembers. He has written so many books that include a Vietnam influence that it is hard to say that none of the books or stories have personal experiences from Vietnam mixed in. In a different interview O’Brien is quoted saying “I can’t deny it’s part of my material, my life, things I care about. Even if I don’t write often, specifically, about Vietnam, a lot of the stuff, for example in The Nuclear Age and in Northern Lights- courage and obligation and so on-flows from that experience”(qtd. in Naparsteck 4). Experience is where O’Brien gets his inspiration. His experiences are real truths from the war and this raises the question again as to what is truth and what is fiction in his stories.

In The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien uses his name to name the main character. However, O’Brien is not referring to himself in the story. It is noted that a lot of his stories are based on personal experiences but not all of the stories are his own. Some of the stories come from the experiences and tales of other soldiers he knew during the war.

O’Brien wrote that “‘Speaking of Courage’ came from a letter [that O’Brien received] from a guy named Norman Bowker, a real guy, who committed suicide after [O’Brien] received his letter. In his letter he talked about how he just couldn’t adjust to coming home. It wasn’t bad memories; it was that he couldn’t talk to anybody about it. […] All he could do was drive around and around his hometown in Iowa, around this lake. In the letter he asked [O’Brien] to write a story about it, and [O’Brien] did” (Naparsteck 7).

This is a story where truth takes precedence over fiction. It is a fact that this story was influenced by a true moment or tale from O’Brien’s time in the war. The idea of a soldier not being able to adjust to his or her normal, comfortable surroundings after returning from a war is a very common theme throughout many of O’Brien’s stories. However, O’Brien often labels these stories as fiction even though it is evident from Bowker’s letter to O’Brien that this idea is very true for many soldiers. With so many memories and experiences, it is possible that more of O’Brien’s stories have some truth to them.

Tim O’Brien may have labeled his book The Things They Carried as fiction instead of as a true story because of what he considers to be a real true story. There are many things that contribute to a story. An example would be memory. How the mind recalls the details of a story may be true, there is also the possibility that somebody else who was present during the actual moment does not see the story in the same way. Through someone else’s eyes the same situation and story may be perceived or distorted in a different manner. When a person recalls a certain memory they tend to fill in the blanks with things that they think occurred. The person can’t remember every exact detail so they guess and assume parts of the story that may or may not have happened. O’Brien refers to this in his book The Things They Carried: “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened to what seemed to happen,” (O’Brien 71). This explains why O’Brien considered this book fiction. In his mind the truth was likely skewed because he had to fill in some blanks, which may have caused the story to be somewhat implausible. There are so many factors that can complicate the line between truth and fiction.

Tim O’Brien attempts to distinguish between the two in a couple of his stories. O’Brien considers the book fictional because even though he has experiences of war in Vietnam, which is the fictional part of his stories. Telling which stories are based on truth from the stories that are made up, is almost impossible. "In many cases a true war story cannot be believed," O’Brien writes. "If you believe it, be skeptical. It's a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness” (O’Brien 71). When reading any story the reader tends to get involved in the book, the story becomes real to the person reading it. They can picture everything that is going on crystal clear in their head. Whether the book is truth or fiction, the mind perceives it as being true, doing this without even noticing. Our mind relates the book and puts ourselves in the position to believe that what is happening in the story has actually happened in real life to that person or character. This feeling of reality is exactly what O’Brien is trying to achieve through his writing. O’Brien wants his readers to get lost in his stories.

When reading, it is almost as if our minds are dreaming. The brain slips into a kind of state, lost in a river of thoughts. So infatuated with the story that it does not register that it is fictional, specifically made up to emit pleasure as the words dance off the page. O’Brien talks about this in his short story The Lives of the Dead which is in The Things They Carried; “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (O’Brien 230). Is it really possible for a story to be totally true? The brain fills in the blanks using the imagination and not even realizing it. This manipulates the story into fiction. This proves that the difference between truth and fiction is a thin line. O’Brien does not want to consider the stories he wrote to be true because even though there is much truth to them from his experiences, there is much that is also made up and is fictional in his stories. He might call the book fiction because in his mind it is. He considers it fiction because that is the majority of the book. Stories might be based off of life experiences but that is it, they are just based off of them. The exact details are not recalled and are not totally true. The idea of the story, or the fact that there is a story at all, is the only truth. In a sense the facts are fictional even though Speaking of Courage is based off of true experiences.

There are not many legitimately true stories. Even stories that are proclaimed to be completely truthful are likely to have some small detail that has been accidently changed due to a lapse in memory or maybe some small outside influence. O’Brien does not by any means label The Things They Carried as a true story, but he does let it be known that some portion of the book was likely written from truth by accident. He may have also written some of it with the intention of describing true events. However, his philosophy is that a completely true story is very hard to come by because of two possible factors. Either it is impossible to recall every detail correctly, or other individuals who may have shared the experience may not recall it in exactly the same way. O’Brien experienced many rare moments that only war can provide, but so did his fellow soldiers. It seems that there is no real way to determine fact from fiction in O’Brien’s stories. It is, however, much easier to label a story as fiction as opposed to fact. O’Brien decided that he did not want to risk lying to himself and the rest of the world. As a result, he determined that there was more truth in calling his stories fiction than there was in trying to label them as true. To O’Brien, fiction wins every time.

Works Cited

Chen, Tina. ""Unraveling the Deeper Meaning": Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"." Contemporary Literature. VOL 39. University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 77-98. JSTOR. Web. 17 Oct 2010.

Frost, Adam. "O'Brien, Tim, 1946-." Literature Online biography. Literature Online, n.d. Web. 6 Nov 2010.

Naparsteck, Martin. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." Contemporary Literature. VOL.32. University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 1-11. JSTOR. Web. 17 Oct 2010

O'Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried”. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2009. Print.