"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war." (85).
It's a book about storytelling.
That's why I love it.
Dog ears:
p. 85: "All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth."
p. 157-158: "Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat... By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain thruths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."
p. 179-180: "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is trues sometimes than happening-truth.
"Here is the happening-truth. I once was a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
"Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of the red clay trial near the village of My Khe. his jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him."
I like how O'Brien takes time out of the narrative to talk about what he is doing in his storytelling and why; the way he questions what is Truth in a story, or how the truest things are often total fabrications. Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is like this book in those respects - it is a story that self analyzes what it is doing and to what ends, and if the end justifies the means.
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I live the last quote you picked. Any one who goes through this stuff must be so messed up afterwards. He says in other parts of the book that the memories never go away. I love that he tells the story of the man he killed in numerous different ways. It reminds me of when you're telling a story and every time you tell it you recall different facts or different parts are important. The stories you tell over and over are the ones that have shaped your life in some way.
ReplyDeleteI think that is why the book is told in these little parts, these glimpses that frustrated you the first time around. More than a writer's tactic to draw us in and then keep us anticipating, I think the story is told in this piece-meal sort of way for just the reason you said here: this story is the narrator's memories, and "when you're telling a story, every time you tell it you recall different facts or different parts are important. The stories you tell over and over are the ones that have shaped your life in some way."
ReplyDeleteWould it be too base to have a writing project where students try to tell a set of memories they have in this bit by bit way? I like this for me, because it sounds like fun for myself to try, but I don't know how/why it would be in a classroom, because if you want the students to write a story, wouldn't you want them to write it in there own way? I guess the ultimate question is are style exercises like the one based on TTTC getting students to expand their writing repertoire, or are they getting in the way of student writing by making their story conform to this artificial style?