Tim O'Brien's Blurring of the Lines Between Reality and Fantasy

In Tim O'Brien's novel "The Things They Carried," O'Brien blurs the lines between truth and portrayal of truth. In essence, he says that there is no such thing as truth. Truth is dependent on the perception of the person experiencing the episode and what goes on in the mind of this person. The truth fades and shifts or is illuminated in the telling. Truth is slippery and ever-changing and completely subjective.

The book begins with the quote, "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary." Two pages later O'Brien provides a dedication to "the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa." These are the novel's main characters. The reader is meant to question the blur of the lines between fact and fiction. The reader is meant to ask, "Why O'Brien would be thanking these men if this work is entirely fiction?"

O' Brien recognizes that there is no one real truth as he writes these short stories. Real truth transcends fact. In "The Man Who Never Was," he makes his goals known when he says, "the thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness." (O'Brien 230). In other words, Tim O'Brien uses events to dramatize feelings so that the reader can participate in the story as well. The character in "the Man Who Never Was" brings alive his first love. He ends the book in order to tell us that events and people come alive again as others remember. In that way, there is no final truth; it is always shaping and molding.

Tim O'Brien manages this blur of truth in many ways. One of those ways is that he creates a narrator who is modeled after himself. This narrator is a Harvard grad, a drafted Vietnam War vet, and goes by the name of Tim O'Brien. The reader is encouraged to connect the narrator with the author as a way to question what is true. "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer than happening-truth" (203). For example, in another interview on Richmond.com, when asked,

Interviewer: "What do you say when people ask, 'Are these stories true?'

Tim: "I tell them to reread the book. It's kind of the point of the book: What is truth?"

Interviewer:" Can you get to a deeper truth through fiction?"

Tim: "Yes, I think so. One of the chapters in "The Things They Carried" is about a character with my name going to the Canadian border. He meets an old man up there, almost crosses into Canada but doesn't. I never literally did any of these things, but I thought about it. It was all happening in my dreams and in my head. And the one thing fiction can do is make it seem real. To let the reader participate in this kid making this journey and it feels like it's really happening. You hope the reader's asking the same questions that you were back then. You know, like 'What would I do? Would I go to Canada? What do I think of war?' So even if the story never happened, literally, it happened in my head."

If I were to tell you the literal truth about that summer, the truth would be that I played a lot of golf and worried a lot about the draft. But that's a crummy story. It doesn't make you feel anything." (Richmond.com)

This story, called On the Rainy River, combined with this wrote illustrates the point of O'Brien's book. He did not do the things in the story, but he considered them. The real "truth" would be boring but the embellished "truth is still true. Just because he did not live these things does not mean that they are not true. He has embellished the "truth" in his head in order to dramatize the moral dilemma for the reader.

In the book The Things They Carried, O'Brien says, "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths (O'Brien 158). . For example, in the short story "How to Tell a True War Story," Mitchell Sanders confesses to the main character that although his story is true, parts of it are wholly made up. "Last night, man, I had to make up a few things. The glee club. There wasn't any glee club....No opera. But it's still true" (O'Brien 83-84).

Throughout the book there are many different versions of the truth. "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen...The angles of vision are skewed" (71).The story called "Spin" tells of the Vietnamese soldier that the narrator killed. The story "The Man I Killed" describes the same dead Vietnamese man and creates a history for him. He "loved mathematics(142), he had "only been a soldier for a single day" (144), and like the narrator he went to war in order to avoid "disgracing himself, and therefore his family and village" (142). The story "Ambush" makes the reader wonder whether any of this ever happened, and "Good Form" reverses details. That narrator tells us that he was not the thrower of the grenade that killed the solider and then "Even that story is made up" (203). "in a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. O'Brien keeps giving the reader truth and then revising it or reshaping that truth to something else. The reader is never quite sure where the real "fact" is but finds that it does not matter. There is also never a moral. In O'Brien's own words, "You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning" (77).

When asked about the revisionary nature of truth, O'Brien can clearly explain his philosophy in a way that readers can understand. In an interview on bookreporter.com, he says:

BRC: Your books, and their characters, display a certain amount of moral ambiguity-a sense of this is true but that also is true-or both could be true at the same time. Does this reflect your personal philosophy?

TO: Yes. Truth evolves. Truth is fluid. Truth is a function of language. (If I were to say to you, 'It's now 10:00 A.M., I would be telling the 'truth' of Boston, Massachusetts, but not the 'truth' of Tokyo Japan). A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. (Bookreporter).

This philosophy is clearly shown in the above examples.

O'Brien tells us his concept of stories and the power they have. Retelling and reshaping truth can give the writer and/or reader closure, just like in life. When further asked in the Curran interview,

Interviewer: What can stories do for us?

Tim: Stories do a lot for us. They can help us heal. They can make us feel part of something bigger. We all tell stories to ourselves-about today and tomorrow-we live our lives based on a story we tell ourselves. And we're constantly adjusting it...hoping for a happy ending. (Curran)

In other words, lives are about stories-the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell others. What is really true in our lives as we live it? Might there be events that we view incredibly significant now that we won't remember twenty years from now? Are there trivial details now that might come to have great impact on our lives or teach us incredible lessons? So where is this elusive truth? Truth is what we see from our own personal experience, and truth changes as we live our lives and as we keep remembering things, events, and people in our lives. Truth changes as we mature and as we continue to tell our stories or play them over in our minds. As critic Kaplan says, "O'Brien saves himself by demonstrating in this book that events have no fixed or final meaning and that the only meaning that events can have is one that emerges momentarily and then shifts and changes each time that the events come alive as they are remembered or portrayed" (Kaplan). The key is hopefully to learn something or gain some insight from the process of telling and retelling.

Works Cited

Tim O'Brien. http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-obrien-tim.asp

Curran, Colleen. Tim O'Brien discusses "The Things They Carried in Richmond for GO READ. Nov. 11, 2003. Retrieved June 6, 2007 at http://www.richmond.com/ae/output.aspx?Article_ID=2730476

O'Brien, "The Things They Carried," Broadway Publishing. 1991.

Kaplan, Steven, The Undying Uncertainty of the narrator in Tim O'Brien's the things they carried. Explicator Fall 1993 43-52.