Tim O’Brien Essay Example for Free

Tim O’Brien Essay Tim O’Brien is a well-know war writer, probably the most famous war writer of our time but also a writer about relationships that disintegrate and how they do so.   His novels hinge on his own experiences in the Vietnam War or the time leading up to that experience.   But he is not a typical writer of war.   In Tim O’Brien’s novels, O’Brien blurs the lines between truth and portrayal of truth or fiction. In essence, he says that there is no such thing as truth. Truth depends on the perception of the person experiencing the episode and what goes on in the mind of this person. The truth fades and shifts or is illuminated further in the telling. Truth is slippery and ever-changing and completely subjective. He blurs these lines over and over again to show the reader the slippery slope of what we call truth.   O’Brien, in some ways, can tell the same kinds of stories but with a different focus so they are completely new.   Overall, O’Brien believes in the power of stories.   As O’Brien says, I’m a believer in the power of stories, whether they’re true or embellished, and exaggerated, or utterly made up.   A good story has a power that transcends the question of factuality or actuality† (Bonn).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   O’Brien’s novel styles and themes begin right from the start of his career.   .   If I Die in the Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home was published in 1973.   It is a memoir which deals with Vietnam and the region around My Lai.   It was the first book that began O’Brien’s genre of what is called â€Å"creative nonfiction.   And then comes his first published novel, Northern Lights discusses two brothers.   One has returned from war wounded and the two brothers are uncomfortable with their own lives as well as their relationships with their father, who has died.   His themes of war and disintegration of relationships begin to be shown in this novel. He continues with these themes in Going After Cacciato published in 1978 and the Nuclear Age in 1985.   Going After Caccioto is the story of a soldier who decides to run away from the Vietnam War. In many ways, this novel is an earlier telling of a story from â€Å"The Things They Carried.†Ã‚   The short story â€Å"On the Rainy River† retells this novel, only with a different ending, which characterizes O’Brien’s creative nonfiction.   In other words, the novel is another way that the story could have ended, not necessarily the way it did end.   Nuclear Age is a discussion of how we would live if confronted with the possibility of nuclear extinction. Then in 1990 he seems to hit a stride and critical acclaim with The Things They Carried.   This is a collection of short stories but also a novel in itself as it begins and ends with the same story.   The book begins with the quote, â€Å"This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author’s own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary† (O’Brien).   Two pages later O’Brien provides a dedication to â€Å"the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.† (O’Brien).     These are the novel’s main characters. The reader is meant to question the blur of the lines between fact and fiction. The reader is meant to ask, â€Å"Why O’Brien would be thanking these men if this work is entirely fiction?†Ã‚   In this book, Tim O’Brien manages this blur of truth in many other ways as well. One of thos e ways is that he creates a narrator who is modeled after himself. This narrator is a Harvard grad, a drafted Vietnam War vet, and goes by the name of Tim O’Brien. The reader is encouraged to connect the narrator with the author as a way to question what is true. The narrator says, â€Å"I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer than happening-truth† (O’Brien 203). When asked in an interview, â€Å"What do you say when people ask, â€Å"Are these stories true?† Tim replies, Tim: â€Å"I tell them to reread the book. It’s kind of the point of the book: What is truth?†Ã‚   Tim explains more thoroughly when he talks in the same interview about getting to a deeper truth through fiction.   Ã¢â‚¬Å"One of the chapters in â€Å"The Things They Carried† is about a character with my name going to the Canadian border. He meets an old man up there, almost crosses into Canada but doesn’t. I never literally did any of these things, but I thought about it. It was all happening in my dreams and in my head. And the one thing fiction can do is make it seem real. To let the reader participate in this kid making this journey and it feels like it’s really happening. You hope the reader’s asking the same questions that you were back then. You know, like ‘What would I do? Would I go to Canada? What do I think of war?’ So even if the story never happened, literally, it happened in my head.† If I were to tell you the literal truth about that summer, the truth would be that I played a lot of golf and worried a lot about the draft† (Curran).   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In other words, what is the real meaning of truth?   O’Brien plays with this concept over and over in his fiction.   The portrays the strangeness of how the mind works when dealing with memories and hypothetical situations. In the Lake of the Woods published in 1994 A spooked veteran who has secrets discovers that his wife has secrets too.   Both of these people â€Å"escape† to the inner recesses of their own minds in order to come to some kind of terms with their lives.   O’Brien shows his mastery at blurring the lines between reality and fantasy here as well as the novel focuses on two of his favorite subjects, war and failing relationships.   As the couple struggles with the secrets in their relationship, O’Brien uncovers that fact that truth is what we say it is, and what we say determines how and what we think.   He continues to blur the lines even further with an essay called The Vietnam in Me in 1994 in which he goes back to Vietnam twenty years later to reflect on the experiences of the Vietnam War.   This essay also explores the deterioration of a relationship for him.   He basically tries to reconcile what really happened in My Lai in his mind after all these years while faced with the gap opening up between he and Kate. His more recent work changes focus just a bit.   War becomes more secondary content.   In Tomcat in Love (1998) this humorous story or â€Å"black comedy† as it is called in the Gadfly interview is told from the perspective of a sexist professor who attempts to deal with the disintegration of his relationship.   However, he tries to wreak revenge on his ex-wife by sabotaging her current relationship.   And in July, July (2002) ten friends reunite about 30 years after they graduate.     They find that many of the same things haunt them now as haunted them then, only they are at totally different places in their lives.   This story is much like The Things they Carried in that the individual stories are tied together in the end. One of the characters has been through Vietnam, but more than anything this book is again about re-telling of the truth.   The â€Å"truths† that these characters had identified for themselves thirty years ago are different in many ways than their truths of today.   Does that make them any less true? When asked about the various truths of this novel,   BRC: Your books, and their characters, display a certain amount of moral ambiguity—a sense of this is true but that also is true—or both could be true at the same time. Does this reflect your personal philosophy? TO: Yes. Truth evolves. Truth is fluid. Truth is a function of language. (If I were to say to you, ‘It’s now 10:00 A.M., I would be telling the ‘truth’ of Boston, Massachusetts, but not the ‘truth’ of Tokyo Japan). A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. (Bookreporter). Ultimately Tim O’Brien is a writer who deserves all the acclaim he gets as he has much to say not only about war and relationships but about the very essence of truth itself.   He is a storyteller in every sense of the word and believes in the power of stories, no matter what kind they are.   In an interview, he clearly demonstrates his philosophy about the power of storytelling and truth. Interviewer: What can stories do for us? Tim: Stories do a lot for us. They can help us heal. They can make us feel part of something bigger. We all tell stories to ourselves—about today and tomorrow—we live our lives based on a story we tell ourselves. And we’re constantly adjusting it†¦hoping for a happy ending. (Curran) He describes good fiction as fiction that makes us look inside ourselves and O’Brien is a master even when the â€Å"content† of the stories are not typical for most of us.   He can make us look at courage and truth and evaluate our own relationships all in the reading of his fiction. Works Cited Tim O’Brien, Novelist.   Retrieved November 27, 2007 at Web Site:   http://illyria.com/tobhp.html Iver, Pico, Missing in Contemplation, Time Magazine.   2001, Retrieved November 27, 2007 at Web Site:   http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101941024-163119,00.html Bonn, Maria S. Can Stories Save Us?   Tim O’Brien and the Efficacy of the Text, Critique, Fall 1994, No 1:   2-5. ’Brien, â€Å"The Things They Carried,† Broadway Publishing. 1991. Curran, Colleen. Tim O’Brien discusses â€Å"The Things They Carried in Richmond for GO READ. Nov. 11, 2003. Retrieved November 27, 2007 at http://www.richmond.com/ae/output.aspx?Article_ID=2730476 Tim O’Brien. Retrieved November 30. 2007 at Web Site:   http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-obrien-tim.asp