More O'Brien!

There's been one semi-formed question floating around in my head the entire time I've been reading this novel--is Tim O'Brien telling us what happened to him in Vietnam, or is he telling a story?

Jim Neilson, in his article "The Truth in Things: Personal Trauma as Historical Amnesia in The Things They Carried," brings postmodernism into the mix. Knew it was going to get thrown in there again somewhere.

When I take the chance to think about it--sure, The Things They Carried is a very postmodern novel. It is a "fragmented narrative," as Neilson puts it, which is basically everything postmodernism believes in. And O'Brien adds in plenty of doubt for the reader, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, as I've already pointed out.

Donald Ringnalda states that "the belief that we can distinguish between stories and reality is 'the very reason we got into and waged the Vietnam War.' " After all of these ponderings (as I began the article, I'll admit), this statement kind of blew me away. It's very fierce. I'd love to explore this a little bit in a piece of writing; I feel like there's a lot to say on the subject. Why O'Brien feels like he needs to blur these lines--which parts are, in the context of the narrative itself, truthful--why you can't necessarily tell that they're truthful--just all of that. It's exciting.

Neilson then goes on to argue about the way that The Things They Carried, just like all other literature about the Vietnam War, glorifies the Americans and dehumanizes the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese people suffered tremendous losses during the war--more than most people would initially assume--casualties past the one million mark. The Americans dropped "over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam..." and yet the novel portrays "dehumanizing and racist attitudes towards the Vietnamese."

The exception to this--as immediately popped into my mind, as I read this--is the chapter, "The Man I Killed." I think this chapter is where the book really started to hit me. Maybe all our lives we've been taught in our history classes that the Vietnamese were the bad guys, but, sure, as we get older and start to understand the world a little more, we realize those millions of casualties were people just like us--sad, innocent people. Dead people. Dead people who used to have lives and families, and who used to eat and sleep and laugh and smile. O'Brien--or at least his character in the novel--realizes this in this chapter, as he stares down at the man he killed. It's a painful thing, and I think that emotion carries through the entire narrative, fragmented as it may be. Maybe O'Brien does inadvertantly or anyhow "dehumanize" the Vietnamese, but I think once anyone reads this chapter, that's what they'll remember, not how "they are part of the countryside, 'blend[ing] in with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass.' " That's really kind of how I'm feeling about it.