Vietnam war stories are hard to define, but I think I've got down a decent definition.
Vietnam war stories can be before the war, during the war, or after the war. Vietnam war stories can be about everything and nothing at once. Vietnam war stories can lack a moral. Vietnam war stories can go on, and never end.
But Vietnam war stories must have a truth, any kind of truth. It doesn't have to be factually true. It can be emotionally true.
"Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (O'Brien 179).
"Facts [are] formed by sensation, not the other way around" (O'Brien 89).
During the course of reading this book, I have been so confused on if what I was reading was true or not. We are, after all, in an "Intro to Fiction" class. But, as I read O'Brien's chapter, "How to Tell a True War Story," I decided that it didn't really matter if it was factually true or not.
"Absolute occurence is irrelevant" (O'Brien 83).
After I had decided that the factual truth didn't matter, I came to the chapter "Good Form." It all makes sense after that.
A war story is not written so we can understand the soldiers' experiences. It is not even written to just let us know what happened. It, in fact, is not even really written for the benefit of the reader at all. It is written to help the writer understand what happened. It is written for the writer's benefit.
"Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibilities and faceless grief.... What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at thing I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again" (O'Brien 180).
This passage is connected to the chapter, "The Man I Killed." His emotion and guilt is equal to him killing the man, and it fulfills his need to give a face to his faceless grief and responsibility.
To be a war story, it must have a truth and it must benefit the writer.
That is the definition of a war story.
4 comments:
I really like your definition! I think you're really onto something with the whole "benefiting the writer" thing. I mean, these men spend the best years of their lives trading bullets with Communists in a far away land, it's hard to argue they write for the money or the recognition. These authors want to share their stories but in doing so it helps them cope with what really happened. Ashleigh, do you think O'Brien chose a good point in the book to inform his reader that most of his stories we not factually true? Would it have been better if he told us from the start, or maybe at the very end of the book?
The point that you make about story-truth vs. happening-truth I think is a very important part to this book. Because O'Brien was "young...and afraid to look" at the bodies while he was in Vietnam, we would have never envisioned these intense images about the Vietnam War (O'Brien 180). Therefore, it is through O'Brien's story-truth that we, the reader, are able to get a bigger and better picture of the "true meaning of his stories.
I think that he chose a good time. As a reader though, you have to accept what he says. I think that if you just got mad that it wasn't real, put the book down and never read it again because you "felt deceived," you have missed the entire message and meaning of the story. The story is trying to communicate with you how O'Brien felt. It doesn't matter if it's real or not.
So, as long as the reader understood that the answer of if it was real didn't matter, I think it was a perfect time, because after that, you can just try to take hold of the emotion of the rest of the book and know that's how he felt. If it had come at the end, as a reader, you wouldn't be able to experience the emotion in his writing with your new realization unless you went back and read the book again. If it came at the beginning, you wouldn't have the emotional attachment to the characters in the story. Some might not even bother reading it at all.
So, I think it was a perfect time, and as long as the reader understood what O'Brien was trying to do for himself and for others, it shouldn't have mattered that it wasn't real.
I like the fact that you say a true war story is for benefiting the writer and not the reader. Even if the facts are not true, the writer is trying to get his emotions on how he felt during the particular story out on paper. This emotion that is shown is truer than any facts or graphs can show.
Post a Comment