Julia Schwartz
September 29, 2002
Finding Truth
In A Place for Stories, historian William Cronon uses two conflicting descriptions of one event, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, to characterize storytelling as an art changed by its artist. In examining the effects different factors can have on the ultimate narrative and the purpose of storytelling, Cronon provides meaning for Tim O’Brien’s collection of stories, The Things They Carried.
In The Things They Carried, O’Brien often reminds his readers that “almost everything [in his book] is invented” (O’Brien 179), even though all his stories involve either him or people with him. This contradiction is present throughout the whole book, raising the question of the authenticity of the stories in The Things They Carried. Any reader of O’Brien’s book would assume that the stories were, real memories of the author, and that all the characters actually did exist, but at the beginning of the book, in small little letters above the copyright information, reads the typical fiction caviat: “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.” However, on the very next page lies the dedication, which reads, “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.” These two obviously contradictory statements identify the essence of the book: the ever-present question of where the truth leaves off and the fiction begins.
The honest tone and the recursive sequence of events lend the reader to believe in the truth of O’Brien’s stories. He relays most of the story not in chronological order, but through incremental repetition, which is the most natural method for someone creating “competing narratives in [his] efforts to understand… the human past” (Cronon 914). As O’Brien sometimes alludes to, The Things They Carried is his personal way of dealing with his surreal past experience in the Vietnam War. To O’Brien, the truth of the war is recursive. In order to find the real truth that will allow him to come to terms with himself and his past, O’Brien has to sift through all of his unfamiliar truths, and because the memories are so incongruous, it is hard to believe that they are indeed truth. Cronon’s statement that “narrative is a… way of organizing reality” (914) clearly is something that unquestionably describes O’Brien in his search for the moral of his war in The Things They Carried.
Perhaps one of the most paradoxical stories in The Things They Carried is that of the man O’Brien killed (or did not kill) outside the village of My Khe, Vietnam. O’Brien’s guilt as he tells the story is heart-wrenching, and the raw emotion present in his words directly passes on the pain of killing another human being to his reader. At this point, a reader cannot imagine the story being false, for how could something imaginary yield so much pain? In one ephemeral chapter midway through his book, O’Brien directly addresses the issue of whether or not his stories are true or not. “It’s time to be blunt,” he says. “Twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, and my presence was guilt enough… I blamed myself” (179). Then the story of him killing the man was false- even though the guilt was true? No, not so fast: a mere three short paragraphs later, O’Brien says again, “He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him” (180). Like any single truth, this double truth has two interpretations, two completely different stories that would result. If the first statement is true, than O’Brien’s honesty is clouded by the confusion that the war caused him, and all the contradictions in his stories are a result of his guilt and confusion: perhaps he feels that because he was a part of the war, each individual death as a result of the war was caused by him. The “alternative position” (Cronon 915) is that the second statement is true, meaning that deep inside of his past, O’Brien knows that he killed the man, but he can’t admit it to himself.
But what if these statements don’t have different meanings- what if both statements are true? Then when O’Brien’s little daughter Kathleen asks her daddy, “’did you ever kill anybody?’ [O’Brien] can say honestly, ‘Of course not,’ or [he] can say, honestly, ‘Yes’” (179.) Here lies O’Brien’s truth: There is no concrete truth. Because it is his own story of his own past, the truth is merely what he believes. If O’Brien believes he killed the slim young man, he did. If he believes his guilt makes him think he did, he didn’t. But really, it doesn’t matter in the end, because either way, his guilt is still the same.
Although Cronon thoroughly discusses two completely different narratives of the Dust Bowl, he never criticizes the basic fact that there actually are two completely different narratives of the Dust Bowl. Cronon realizes the contradiction of any truth, of any event, and realizes that humans have a reason for telling stories, and thus it is all right that different narratives of one event occur. In essence, “it doesn’t matter” (O’Brien 238) which “competing narrative” (Cronon 914) chooses to tell, because the important fact is that the narrative was told. “We all constantly tell ourselves stories to remind ourselves who we are, how we got to be that person, and what we want to become” (916), says Cronon, directly mirroring O’Brien when he says, “stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are” (38). As Cronon explains the need for narratives as a method of dealing with reality, O’Brien explains the paradox in his stories by simply categorizing them as stories, and showing that his stories are simply his own method of dealing with reality.
The many contradictions in O’Brien’s stories are confusing, and the first instinct of the reader is to choose true or false, fact or fiction, one or the other. But Cronon proves in A Place for Stories that this is not the goal: the goal is to realize the basic premise of why it matters whether they are true or false, and the importance of the events. As O’Brien says, “the truths are contradictory… there is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (81): but there is a certainty, even if it is not of a single truth. The certainty is that the situation matters, and O’Brien’s story is his way of choosing the truth that matters most to him.