My truth in things.

Alright, so I just got done reading the article by Jim Neilson and by golly is it a long one. Although his article, “The Truth in Things: Personal Trauma As Historical Amnesia in The Things They Carried,” is a lengthy one, the quality of his notes compliments its quantity. It is filled with the utmost insight on The Vietnam War, American ideology, and Tim O’Brien, the author of The Things They Carried. I believe there are two sides to his article, each compromising the strengths and weaknesses of Tim O’Brien’s novel. According to Neilson, Tim O’Brien’s postmodern outlook has a positive influence on his theory of storytelling but has a negative effect on the actual truth behind the Vietnam War along with their culture and people.

Neilson, similar to Tim O’Brien, wanted to show people that the war fought in Vietnam “does not fit within the tidy perimeters of the ethnocentric, traditional war narrative.” He described it as a war “defined by uncertainty -- in motivation, history, strategy, official rhetoric, media representations, identification of friend and foe… It was a nonlinear war, with no objective to seize, no identifiable goal to achieve, and no overall end-date in sight." Before this time in history, America was involved in wars that had a clear enemy and a clear objective. Everyone was supportive of it and stood one hundred percent behind American soldiers and military decisions. But the Vietnam War was different. All of this confusion and uncertainty led to the so called “hippie” revolution and a broken nation full of unsupportive citizens. Many believe this incident was the birth of Postmodernism in literature. War veterans were finally coming home after experiencing a whole new realm of life. They were coming home to a land disappointed with the things they have done and the actions they have made. That is why getting over the traumatic experiences they had across the seas, in the jungles of Vietnam was not an easy task.

Neilson believes this is the reason for O’Brien’s writing The Things They Carried. He states that “The Things They Carried is an embodiment of the processive and indeterminate nature of consciousness; it seeks to replicate a veteran's struggle to make sense of war-time experience and memory.” He continues on saying “Stories are a means of overcoming trauma, a way of bringing body and soul back together… ultimately, The Things They Carried is O'Brien's attempt to sort through the pieces of his life to begin connecting his fractured self into a sensible whole.” But how true are these stories O’Brien is telling his readers? Is it all just a lie? According to Neilson “It is in this process that truth and falsehood, reality and representation, subject and object, fact and fiction cohere. Hence a true war story cannot be separated from its telling… For O'Brien, truth exists as process, as an act of remembering and telling -- truth and reality are inseparable from their imaginative reconstruction.” Stories do not have to be entirely true because “we use our imaginations to deal with situations around us, not just to cope with them psychologically but, more importantly, to deal with them philosophically and morally… It is the significance that we ascribe to stories, the meaning with which we imbue them, that makes them true.” But there is an element which O’Brien lacks in his novel. Neilson believes he fails to represent the history behind Vietnam and the people living through it.

O’Brien absolutely displays the postmodern aspect of storytelling and truths behind narratives, but fails to break down the walls that marginalize Americans from the Vietnamese during those times of war. This is fully embodied by Neilson’s statement which says “Ironically, in attempting to challenge the concept of an autonomous subject, O'Brien writes a text that is obsessed with self, that details the uncertain effects of an unreal war upon an unknowable self but fails to examine its all too real effects upon the Vietnamese.” I have to agree with Neilson’s ideal because “Rather than providing him with a means to celebrate ethnic difference and to represent a marginalized -- in fact, a brutalized -- population, O'Brien's postmodernism causes him to turn inward, to use the death of a Vietcong soldier to question the nature of truth and to celebrate the reconstructive power of the imagination.” He does show some representation of the Vietnamese by going into the fictitious life of a deceased Vietnamese soldier in the story “The Man I Killed,” but “O'Brien nonetheless overlooks the brutality inflicted by massive aerial bombardment and other advanced weapons, the terrible dislocation of the rural peasantry, the use of defoliants and other chemical weapons, the sanctioned slaughter of free-fire zones and the Phoenix Program… the rural Vietnamese self-identity was inseparable from village identity. Yet in The Things They Carried O'Brien seems unaware of the importance of this communal existence; the villages encountered by his platoon are homogenous, their inhabitants generic.” On a larger outlook, “the Vietnamese exist primarily as a backdrop for what is truly important to O'Brien -- an exploration of how the imaginative reconstruction and reconsideration of trauma may serve as a wellspring for literary creation.”

In the end, “O'Brien does not attempt to identify those truths about the war that have been obscured by nationalist myth and capitalist hegemony, focusing instead on the processive and paradoxical nature of all truths. Because of his postmodern sympathies, O'Brien fails to consider the larger cultural and political dynamics of the Vietnam War… The weakness of The Things They Carried… O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese. In so doing, O'Brien has constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war.” I think I made this way too long like the article itself.

“The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche. “
~ Alex Lifeson