How to Tell a True War Story



How to Tell a True War Story

Introduction

O'Brien has highlighted the ambiguity between subjective and objective truths in his collection of twenty-two tales The Things They Carried. A large number of literary scholars including Catherine Calloway have struggled to find out the truth in these tales. O'Brien has purposively fictionalized his tales, and the contained war experiences; at the same time he claims that the stories are true. Most scholars question this claim. This essay discusses Catherine Calloway argument about the O'Brien stories.

Discussion

O'Brien employed metafiction narrative as a representative vehicle of his stories. Metafiction is defined as the theory and practicing of self conscious fiction. O'Brien, similar to other metafiction writers, openly discusses the nature of fiction in his writing and pose question on the relationship between reality and fiction (O'Brien, 1990). He states in “The True War Story”, that if moral can be found in such stories, it is embedded as thread is embedded in the cloth. O'Brien states that it is almost essential to add fiction to the war stories to make them interesting. First of all, it is quite difficult to narrate all the happenings of the war in the form of a story. Even if the author succeeds in writing such a piece, then the points included in it would not be sufficient to hit the readers, as it would have been hit with the addition of fiction.

The readers trust O'Brien on his 22 tales because of his writing style. He used metafiction throughout the piece; he discussed the difficulties he had to face while searching for the words to express what actually happened during the Vietnam War and what appeared to happen. Even, at the points where O'Brien created uncertainty for the readers by stating that they should ...