How to Tell a True War Story - Week 4

[Tristan Riesen]

How to Tell a True War Story by Tim O’Brien is a fantastic story about a man’s struggle with the Vietnam War.  The struggle’s he faces goes into the past, present, and future of the narrator’s trepidations.  The story is told from the present, or at least a time after the war, and this retrospection allows Tim O’Brien to tell the story in no particular order.  I see the chaos or ‘order’ of the story as a representation of what O’Brien is trying to say about war.  The way a story comes back to us, or a war story as O’Brien says, can sometimes bring rise to false claims, and even complete lies – but it’s the lies which bring out the truth. 

            For starters, I don’t think O’Brien is just telling a war story.  He’s actually using a war story (or love story as the narrator points out) as a reflection on love, hate, jealousy, friendship, and the overall human condition.  O’Brien does not euphemize but does allow his narrator and hopefully his audience to come to terms with using lies to tell the truth.  I find this incredibly ironic because it seems to me that O’Brien believes euphemizing, though he doesn’t come right out and say it, is so much more perverse than a lie.  He seems to think, unlike so many others, that using a word, phrase, or even a whole story to do anything but tell the truth – no matter how many lies you tell – is a story tellers blasphemy to the god of storytelling.  The lies or the fiction we tell are used as representations of truths, truths which are sometimes – normally even – too close to the truth to be told, read, or made into any story.  The truth tends to come off as false, melodramatic, and it sometimes even makes the audience suspicious, paranoid, and incapable to trusting such a story filled with actual truth.

            The narrator rarely comes out and tells us what he believes, yet he seems to believe we need to hear what he has to say – because for some reason we should already know what he knows, but we don’t.  This whole idea O’Brien postulates of the truth being full of lies and lies being full of something more than truth is merely circumvented throughout the story, it is never brought to its fullest fruition.  Possibly, because the idea is so open ended, and seems to have as little of a beginning as it does an end, the understanding of storytelling may never be fully mastered.

O’Brien uses the narrator’s voice to show the narrator has kind of become corrupted and perversed by his experiences.  In the stories the narrator tells from during the war he seems young and kind of like a smart ass to me, but he still has an interest in things, like the interest he has in his friend Sanders’ story.  At first he seems nearly indifferent, but the story has grown on him since Sander’s told it to him in Vietnam.  There is, as I’ve said, a disconnection between that story being told to the narrator by Sanders and the narrator telling the story to us as the audience because he has changed so much.  Maybe it was the war, maybe it was what happened to Curt Lemon, or maybe it was the old lady who says she loves his ‘war’ story – but whatever it was changed the narrator and gave him a pragmatic, unveiling story to tell.