Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: "Night March" and "Speaking of Courage" - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000 by John H. Timmerman

Suddenly Paul Berlin begins to giggle--suffocating, spasmodic laughter that has him helpless in the grass:

He giggled. He couldn't stop it, so he giggled, and he imagined it clearly. He imagined the medic's report. He imagined Billy's surprise. He giggled, imagining Billy's father opening the telegram: SORRY TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON BILLY BOY WAS YESTERDAY SCARED TO DEATH IN ACTION IN THE REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM. Yes, he could imagine it clearly.

He giggled. He rolled onto his belly and pressed his face in the wet grass and giggled, he couldn't help it. (193)

To survive his own fear Paul Berlin battles it with laughter. But it is laughter on the verge of hysteria; since nothing makes any sense, all one can do is laugh.

As he lies giggling on the grass, now watching the clouds pass over the moon, marking the passing of time and the nightmare, Paul Berlin now imagines himself talking with his father. As in "Speaking of Courage," the absent father is one of the most important characters in this story. He represents both a confessor figure and also an incarnation of personal and moral values in a war without apparent purpose or value. And now Paul Berlin finds a way to respond to this father:

Giggling, lying now on his back, Paul Berlin saw the moon move. He could not stop. Was it the moon? Or the clouds moving, making the moon seem to move? Or the boy's round face, pressing him, forcing out the giggles. "It wasn't so bad," he would tell his father. "I was a man. I saw it the first day, the very first day at the war, I saw all of it from the start, I learned it, and it wasn't so bad, and later on, later on it got better, later on, once I learned the tricks, later on it wasn't so bad." He couldn't stop. (194-95)

The moon clouds up again. The column moves on. Cacciato--to this point unnamed, a scarcely seen visitant called "the boy"--hands Paul Berlin a stick of Black Jack gum--"the precious stuff." And then we learn the boy's name with his ironic jest: "'You'll do fine,' Cacciato said. 'You will. You got a terrific sense of humor'" (195)--ironic in that it was fear, not humor, that provoked Berlin's uncontrolled giggling.

The moral argument that the horrors of war so threaten human sensibility that they must be escaped by fantasy or fought by laughter (both of which Berlin does with only limited success) is precisely reversed by the conditions of the postwar story. Having now arrived back in the World, the ideal world always dreamed of during the war, the veteran discovers that he carries with him the undeniable fact of war. He cannot escape the memory. Oddly, the present world now becomes the fantasy; the past war has become the reality. The fantasy is engendered by the simple fact that people in the world have chosen to deny the reality of the war; they don't want to hear about it. Least of all do they want to hear about it from the returned veteran, which would make their abstracted, statistical notions of war altogether too real.

Other thematic patterns of "Night March" survive intact in "Speaking of Courage." Norman Bowker was originally Paul Berlin. Like Paul Berlin, he has struggled with courage and cowardice. He too seeks a confessor-father into whose ears he wants to pour his story. But in this carefully crafted tale, all of civilization seems to block the telling, and thereby to deny reality to Norman Bowker.