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How to Tell a True War Story
Explanation and Analysis:
The Things They Carried can be classified as a Vietnam War narrative from the American perspective. Although it seems fair to call the book a collection of war stories, it's not completely clear how the stories in the collection are connected to one another. In literature, the short stories in a given collection are often not at all related. In O'Brien's book, however, the stories belong to the same world and feature the same narrator and the same cast of characters. Rather than calling the book a collection of short stories, then, it seems possible for the reader to wonder whether the collection might function as a novel, with each story being a chapter. Another possibility is to see the stories as smaller vignettes from one larger narrative.
While the overarching genre can be nailed down as military fiction, O'Brien devotes a fair portion of the collection to questioning what a war story is—and whether the stories he is telling are war stories. In "How to Tell a True War Story," he even goes so far as to claim that "in many cases a true war story cannot be believed," or that "in other cases you can't even tell a true war story" because "it's just beyond telling." Over the course of the story, truth becomes a tenuous ideal: "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true."
O'Brien's hesitations about the possibility of truth in storytelling, the doubts he gives the reader about his trustworthiness as narrator, and his paradoxical concerns about the adequacy of language all give The Things They Carried a postmodern air. In literature, postmodernism is associated with political themes and self-reflexivity. This form of literature emerged in the last decades of the 20th century, when O'Brien began to write. Another postmodern move is to subvert genre classifications, which he frequently does throughout the collection—especially when he breaks down what a war story is, and uncovers how his own stories have come together.
At the end of "How to Tell a True War Story," O'Brien describes reading a story aloud, and being told that it was an appealing story even if the person "as a rule" hates war stories. He corrects this hypothetical audience member in his head, thinking that they hadn't been listening: "It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story." He goes on to state that "a true war story is never about war."
It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow.
Through the story's ending, O'Brien makes two somewhat contradicting claims: that one of his stories is a love story rather than a war story, and that war stories are about all these other things (like love) rather than war. Later in the collection, he makes similar contradictions. After Bowker identifies his experience as “a good war story," for example, he proceeds to reflect that "it was not a war for war stories." At another point, O'Brien labels one of the stories in the collection as a "postwar story" rather than a war story. Throughout The Things They Carried, O'Brien complicates the genre of the work by examining storytelling and questioning the definition of war story.
Related Themes:
