The Truth is No Excuse

Tim O'Brien's short story How to Tell a True War Story explores the problematic connection between fact and fiction and the roles they play in both war and storytelling. Tim O’Brien makes it abundantly clear that he is far more interested in the narrative construct of story as a means of expressing emotional truth, than he is about writing events as they may have actually occurred. As a writer, and as a soldier, O’Brien relies on the sensory observation of a war that “has the feel - the spiritual texture - of a great ghostly fog,” to serve as the only tangible truth throughout all of his stories. In The Things They Carried, war represents death in all forms: death of innocence, spiritual death, and death of the body. It is in these stories where the “old rules are no longer binding,” and the only order, or logic to be found in country must come from the storyteller.

O’Brien’s position is that although truth (or fact) may be definitive, unemotional and distant – like history—it fails to convey the psychological depth and damage of events that have been seared into the soldier’s memory by traumatic events. For the storyteller, only the regenerative powers of imagination can reshape trauma into a livable and tolerable condition. When Sanders tells O’Brien that “you just go with the vapors," he is admitting that there is music in the jungle, but that the real stories of madness (or supernatural phenomenon) cannot be told or documented as the truth. They must be transformed, re-invented, and projected as shadows of the truth.

Creativity can be defined as the employment of certain tools for the purpose of expression. The obvious tools are imagination and originality; however, a closer examination of the creative process reveals choice as the primary building block of creativity. Choices like setting, character and dialogue all function to shape the story and give it structure.

A literary term for O’Brien’s approach to storytelling is Metafiction, and it implies a self-aware approach that “draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.” The means (or the mechanism) that O’Brien utilizes to probe the problematic connection between fact and fiction is his story structure. O’Brien structures H.T.T.A.T.W.S. around several stories (a letter, music in the jungle, Curt Lemmon, and the buffalo), and each story is filtered through the character of Tim O’Brien who serves as the moral center. However, the real purpose of these stories is the relationship they have to each other and not Tim O’Brien. They function as an interconnected whole, and serve to tell a larger story – a larger truth about war, love and memory.