Ambiguity in Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell A True War Story”
by Josephine Zhu ~ September 18th, 2010. Filed under: Uncategorized.The entire short story “How to Tell A True War Story” can be summed in a single quotation from the text, “The only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.” This story only emphasizes the loss of connection and sense of misunderstanding between soldiers/veterans, and common civilians. I believe O’Brien’s idea when writing this story, was that war is not what you think it is, or even what HE thinks it is. War cannot just be death, dirty, violent, nor can it just be glorious, beauty, and love. Yet it is all of these things, which creates such a strong ambiguity, and it is with this kind of uncertainty, that makes telling a war story so difficult. How can a soldier tell a war story, when he himself is unsure of what has really happened? Contrastingly, how can an audience really understand the deeper meaning behind a war story, and see past the seemingly cover idea that it is merely a sad story about a war experience? Therefore, how can you really tell a true war story?
My take on this pondering, is that when a tragic war story is told, the audience is listening only with their ears. When a soldier is experiencing the tragic story, he is not “listening” with his ears, but with his heart, and his stomach. Whether the story is true or not will matter to the audience, but to the solider it does not, because when it comes to war, your sense of the definite is lost, and nothing you see, believe, or told is ever absolutely true. Just like the story with Curt Lemon, O’Brien can recall the events to others the way it is: how he was playing catch, stepped on a 105 round, then blew up. He can describe how his body was splattered all over the trees, and how Rat took his pain out on the buffalo. However, O’Brien cannot possibly accurately recall to others what he REALLY saw: how the sunlight made Lemon’s death almost beautiful, how his body seemed to be carried up high into the trees. He can try recalling the story as descriptively as possible to people, like his wife, and the conventional old women who sympathize with him, but they will never understand more than what their ears hear, and they will never really “listen.”
September 18th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
I really like your take on the idea of truth varying by the listener, we only hear the truth, as opposed to experience it with our hearts and stomachs. That’s seems very true, for lack of a better word.
But what hit me most about O’Brien’s argument in how the truth is askew in delivery is the idea that ” Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.” It’s such an intriguing thought that there is a grain of lie in the truth just to convince us of it. It’s a mouthful just to explain the contradiction.
And at the end of the story, we still ask “Is it true?” because “The answer matters,” so every time I read this story (about the 6 man patrol in the mountains), I personally ask no one in particular the same and add ‘But how does Mitchell Sanders know? Was he there? Or did he hear it from one of them even though none of them “say zip?”‘ I just think that we all remain skeptical no matter how the truth is told, unless we’re willing to believe with out stomachs.
September 20th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
I think the idea of truth in war is the same in O’Brien’s story as it is in Jarhead. In How to Tell a True War Story, O’Brien writes that “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever.”
After reading this line, my mind automatically made the connection to Swofford’s closing monologue where he says that when a man comes home from war, whatever else he might do with his life, he will always be a Jarhead.
It seems that both the text and film suggest that the “truth” of war lies in the way war has affected the individual. Once a person has experienced war, they are perpetually living those moments over and over again in their life. It is not about whether or not the listener is actually listening, but, rather, it is about how the speaker relives that exact moment he is speaking of as he tells his story.
October 24th, 2010 at 12:09 am
I read “How to Tell a True War Story,” and formed an opinion (http ://hubpages.com/hub/An-Analysis-of-Tim-OBriens-How-to-Tell-a-True-War-Story-Orange-Sunshine) that, to some degree, is aligned with yours. I did not read the entire book, however; and this deprived me of some context.
Five minutes ago, I read a recent interview of Mr. O’Brien by Sonya Larson in which he relates that in The Things They Carried he was interested in conveying the “elusive and fluid nature” of truth in general.
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