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

The Vietnam war was different from earlier wars, and so posed challenges to the writer that often pushed him or her beyond the limits of conventional literary stereotypes. Dennis Vannatta remarks that "part of the problem that fiction writers have had is trying to build an artistic structure around a war that lacks the familiar geometry of clearly established battle lines, troop movements, and advances and retreats" (242). Steven Kaplan observes that "almost all of the literature on the war ... makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain" (43). Oddly, the very uncertainties also provided a certain liberation for the fiction writer. It was possible to speak more freely of courage, of cowardice, of fears and fantasies.

The combat veteran who writes of combat writes from both inside and outside the experience. Chapter 30 of Cacciato provides an interesting gloss on this fact, for by that point in the book, the reader understands that the term observation post is multidimensional in meaning. Literally it is the elevated spot one climbs to in order to observe possible enemy action. But during the long night hours it is also a spot for reflective observation on the war itself. And the observation post is also a self-reflective place. In chapter 30, Berlin had been fiddling with the optics on the night-vision goggles but now is playing a time-guessing game. Vision and time unify all the reflections of the observation post. Now Paul reflects: "It was a matter of hard observation separating illusion from reality. What happened, and what might have happened" (247). He goes on to wonder why evil things happen, and never the pretty things, and then agrees with Doc Peret's view "that observation requires inward-looking, a study of th e very machinery of observation" (247-48). Insight and vision, and Paul wonders, "where was the fulcrum? Where did it tilt from fact to imagination?" (248). The writer undertakes such observation, trying to balance the outside and inside vision, fact and imagination. Such is also the basic strategy for O'Brien's linking independent stories into the thematically unified novel.

The process of the inside and outside vision bears particular significance for O'Brien's The Things They Carried, for here the writer is very much aware of himself writing fiction about a historical reality he himself experienced. The writer abruptly introduces himself into the text--"I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while" (36). Of course, this may be construed simply as a narrative pose. As Catherine Calloway has pointed out, substantial biographical details of the author differ from those of the narrator (250). Furthermore, in the concluding notes to The Things They Carried, O'Brien again introduces himself as the forty-three-year-old writer, but tells us that "almost everything else is invented." But he insists "it's not a game. It's a form" (203).

Maria S. Bonn points out that "The dizzying interplay of truth and fiction in this novel is not solely aesthetic postmodern gamesmanship but a form that is a thematic continuation of the author's concern throughout his career with the power and capability of story" (13). While soldiers carry many things into battle, as the book's initial chapter details, they also carry many things from battle. In this case, the writer carries stories, sometimes "odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end" (TTC 39), which, like the fragmented war itself, he seeks to place into some kind of order. The writer observes: