Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: "Night March" and "Speaking of Courage" - Critical Essay

A third trait of the true war story, according to O'Brien, might be called its fundamental inconclusiveness. "You can tell a true war story," O'Brien writes, "by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever" (TTC 83). Vietnam gave the lie to tidy endings. It lingers yet in the minds of veterans, sneaking up during unprotected moments. It lingers for them precisely as it does for Norman Bowker. Thus, the true war story resists reduction to generalized moral statements. As O'Brien observes, "In the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe 'Oh'" (TTC 84).

The true war story tells the things that happen to real people. They might, out of abject fear and loneliness, dream away the hours on observation post, delighting, as Cacciato does, in a stick of Black Jack gum. Or, stricken by the inconsolable loneliness of having a story that no one wants to listen to, they might drive in endless circles around an unruffled lake. Late in The Things They Carried, Mitchell Sanders exclaims, "'Hey, man, I just realized something."' Then, very deliberately, "He wiped his eyes and spoke very quietly, as if awed by his own wisdom." It is the wisdom also conveyed by the true war story. "'Death sucks,' he said" (271).

JOHN H. TIMMERMAN is professor of English at Calvin College. In addition to many articles on aesthetics and American literature, he has published 17 books, including T S. Eliot's Ariel Poems: The Poetics of Recovery. He is a Vietnam veteran, 1969-70.

WORKS CITED

Bonn, Maria S. "Can Stories Save Us? Tim O'Brien and the Efficacy of the Text." Critique 36 (Fall 1994): 2-15.

Galloway, Catherine. "'How to Tell a True War Story': Metafiction in The Things They Carried." Critique 26 (Summer 1995): 249-57.

Kaplan, Steven. "The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Critique 35 (Fall 1993): 43-52.

Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. New York: Viking, 1962.

McCaffery, Larry. "Interview with Tim O'Brien." Chicago Review 33 (1982): 129-49.

Naparsteck, Martin. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." Contemporary Literature 32 (Spring 1991): 1-11.

O'Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. New York: Delta, 1978.

-----. If I Die in a Combat Zone. New York: Dell, 1972.

-----. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton, 1990.

-----. "We're Adjusted Too Well." The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam. Ed. A. D. Home. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1981. 205-07.

Rignalda, Don. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.

Schroeder, Eric James. "The Past and the Possible: Tim O'Brien's Dialectic of Memory and the Imagination." Search and Clear. Ed. William J. Searle. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1988. 116-34.

-----. "Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O'Brien. and Robert Stone." Modern Fiction Studies 30 (Spring 1984): 135-64.

Vannatta, Dennis. "Theme and Structure in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982): 242-46.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Hofstra University
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group