Week 8 open topic

I honestly don't know what to think about this story anymore. After reading "How to Tell a True War Story", I was analyzing every story after it thinking about what parts of the story were true and which parts weren't. I got to the chapter called "Good Form", and O'Brien comes out and says that he pretty much made up every story. He says, "It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Nga Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented" (179). He goes on to say that he wants us to feel what he was feeling and he wants us to "know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth" (179). I started to believe that everything in this book was the truth; after all, it was about his life, so I thought. After reading this story, though, I had to rethink these stories. I had to remind myself that this is an Intro to FICTION class, not non-fiction. Though I want to believe that these stories are real, I have to remember that this is not an autobiography. O'Brien did a good job at making me feel like he felt in his stories. I felt as if I was right there next to him in this war. That was his biggest mission of this book, and for me he succeeded. O'Brien states, "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things 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" (180). In recreating these stories, O'Brien was able to relive Vietnam the way that he never really did. He never saw that dead man that he says he killed. He's "left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief" (180) after the war. In his stories, he can make himself brave and a good soldier as opposed to the man who was afraid to look, like he really was. In no way am I saying that O'Brien was a coward, he was just a young twenty something year old who didn't want to look at the dead. While everyone else shook hand with the dead, O'Brien didn't. "I didn't go near the body. I didn't even look at it except by accident. For the rest of the day there was that sickness inside me, but it wasn't the old man's corpse so much, it was that awesome act of greeting the dead" (226). O'Brien was uncomfortable with being friendly to the dead; he was new to the war and he had no sense of humor for these kinds of things. O'Brien did learn how to use words to make things not so bad, though. "It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. 'Just a crunchie munchie,' Rat Kiley said" (238-239). O'Brien made up stories to keep the dead alive. "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 spritis in the head. There is an allusion of aliveness" (230). I still don't know how much of this book is true. I would like to think that there is some sort of truth in it all, but I guess the only one who will ever know is O'Brien, and of course his fellow soldiers. As for me, I feel like an idiot after reading these stories thinking they were all true.