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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
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. (40)
While bits and pieces of the writer flicker in and out of the narration, at one point O'Brien stops the narration altogether and addresses the act of writing itself in "How to Tell a True War Story" (TTC 73--91). He establishes several qualities of the true war story, but the first one seems to contradict what he has said elsewhere about the story's engagement with philosophical and moral substance. In one interview, for example, O'Brien claims that "The writer needs a passionate and knowledgeable concern for the substance of what's witnessed, and that includes the spiritual and theological and political implications of raw experience" (qtd. in McCaffery 137). And in another interview, he points out that "My concerns have to do with abstractions: what's courage and how do you get it? What's justice and how do you achieve it? How does one do right in an evil situation?" (qtd. in Schroeder, "Two Interviews" 145).
But there is a difference between exploring the moral meanings of humans confronting battle and the didactic reduction of that confrontation to moral precept. The true war story, O'Brien says, "does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it" (TTC 76). Truth to experience is a higher aesthetic value than moral precept. Moral lessons are not given by the writer. Rather, the writer's task is to represent experience authentically so that others understand the event, and from that understanding they may, if they choose, adduce their own moral lessons.
This is particularly true regarding courage, the vexing issue before Paul Berlin and Norman Bowker. What actually constitutes courage? Perhaps that's the wrong question because it's too easy to give categorical responses. Either Paul or Norman might have won the Silver Star--a physical representation of an act of courage. Much harder is to assess courage as a quality of human nature itself, yet that is the task O'Brien sets for himself. In an interview, O'Brien says that "Courage interpenetrates the whole fabric of a life. To take a strand out and say this is courage and this is something else violates a central humanness" (qtd. in Naparsteck 4). If there is an ethics of writing for O'Brien, it assumes that the highest moral imperative for the writer is an authentic revelation of human nature.
A second challenge to the writer of the true war story arises precisely out of that effort toward authenticity. Every event is recalled by the intellect and as the emotions experienced during the event; writing involves, as Hemingway understood, the head and the heart. O'Brien puts the challenge like this: "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed" (TTC 78). The difficulty is precisely enacted through Paul Berlin in Cacciato. The story is as much about the fantasy of war as it is about the so-called reality. Soldiers are dreamers: that dreaming is a part of their reality, what O'Brien calls "that surreal seemingness" (Cacciato 78). Paradoxically, as Steven Kaplan has observed, the war fiction becomes "more real than the events upon which it is based" (46) when the life of the imagination arranges the experience of the facts. Liter ary art is never straightforward fact; rather, it arranges facts to communicate what the author wishes to seem true for the reader.
