Post-Truth and Tim O’Brien

By John Humphreys

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of short stories that follows a group of soldiers in Vietnam. Each story hits on different themes, but one of the most important pieces of information O’Brien needs the audience needs to know is that, “This is a work of fiction” per the title page of the entire collection. “Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all of the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary” (Lee 220). Although O’Brien claims most of this is entirely fabricated, what exactly are the “few details” from his life? To what extent does he use the truth in this story if at all? Surprisingly, there is a short story titled “Notes” that gives the reader a behind the scenes look at Tim O’Brien’s writing process and uncovers the process of writing another story titled “Speaking of Courage”. If O’Brien wants to give the impression that all of these stories are fictional, it is curious that he is pretending to tell the truth. This metafictional piece on his writing process is almost poking fun at the readers who want to hear the truth. While “Notes” is most likely fictional, it is a tentpole example of the post-truth themes that ripple through the entire collection.

In order to understand “Notes”, it is important to look at “Speaking of Courage”, the story that “Notes” is about. It follows a man named Norman Bowker who drives around a lake and thinks about the war and his war medals he almost got for courage. The story is largely about how other people perceive war stories, and challenges the notion of symbols. This is an incredibly postmodern idea, but this medal that Norman almost won is nothing but a symbol, a construct. O’Brien relates these medals to war stories, and how they are really just symbols of what actually happened. Constructs of the truth that people distort to perceive what they want to perceive. Although Norman is a civilian now, his skills and knowledge of the war only serve to impress people in his life with how much he knows about war. It feels almost as if courage itself is a construct, formed in memories of the beholder, and perceived by people who were not there or would not know enough to see if it was true. While this is very clearly fiction, Tim O’Brien is explaining a personal experience in society that he thinks is truthful, as a lot of great fiction does.

Furthermore, immediately after “Speaking of Courage”, “Notes” delves into the process of writing “Speaking of Courage”. “Notes” is framed as non-fiction, and starts giving seemingly truthful information about O’Brien’s inspiration for the story. “‘Speaking of Courage’ was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker” are the first words in “Notes”. O’Brien expands on Norman’s story explaining how Norman sent him a lengthy letter expressing his feelings about his town and how Norman killed himself at the YMCA three years later. O’Brien says that writing was “a way of grabbing people by the shirt, and explaining exactly what happened to me”(O’Brien 151). This feels like a nonfiction, until O’Brien starts referencing his fake characters, and explaining how those moments affected him to write this story. Therefore, what is provably true and which parts of this is the real Tim O’Brien and which parts is the character “Tim O’Brien”?

A few aspects of  “Notes” is definitely true. O’Brien explains how he changed the name of the protagonist from Paul Berlin to Norman Bowker. There were actually two versions of “Speaking of Courage”, as O’Brien is know to revise and rewrite all the time. The first edition that was published in “The Massachusetts Review”, the main character’s name is Paul Berlin, and the story is word for word the same. Also, in Norman Bowker’s letter, he references O’Brien’s book, If I Die In a Combat Zone. This book is real, as well. Other than that, Norman Bowker does not exist in real life, and all of the other details are completely unconfirmed.

The metaphysics of Tim O’Brien’s truth is so complex, it is a wonder why he decided to put “Notes” in his short story collection at all. Tim O’Brien’s version of fiction is blended into real life to the point in which the audience does not know what is real, and what is fake. People attempt to explain O’Brien’s post-truth tendencies with more of his fiction work, but what do his undeniably nonfiction works say about his resistance to truth? In “About Tim O’Brien” by Don Lee, Lee explains the time O’Brien published an essay in the New York Times about his return to Vietnam, and the complex relationship between insanity and love. “But he went a step further, drawing parallels between the ‘guilt, depression, terror, shame’ that infected both his Vietnam experience and his present life, especially now that his girlfriend left him. Chillingly, he admitted, ‘Last night suicide was on my mind. Not whether, but how.’”(Lee 196) The article goes on to say that Tim O’Brien thinks that was one of the best things he has ever written, and he reads it twice a month. This particular anecdote about Tim’s experience in Vietnam, and what a non-fictional piece actually looks like for him, is telling of why he beats around the bush of truth with his blurred version of hyperreality.

Clearly whatever happened to O’Brien in Vietnam is not something he wants to life out in perfect detail. If he visits Vietnam thirty years after the war, and immediately contemplates suicide, a memoir would be the end of his life. The truth is an incredibly intense situation for Tim, and it is quite clear in The Things They Carried even though we do not get the whole truth. The scenes filled with an immense amount of terror, for example the death of a baby buffalo, or Kiowa’s death, could have been commonplace in the war, so common that O’Brien is only referencing those situations with a fictional account to encompass the underlying truth of the action itself. Ironically, it is possible that this could be more truthful than trying to remember the actions through a filtered and flawed human memory, dismantled by trauma. The truth, in O’Brien’s case, is so intense that it is capable of ending him, so he cleverly sneaks through expressing the direct truth, and only weaves it in where it is not explicitly traumatic. The effect is disorienting for the reader, but at the same time, incredibly engaging. In an essay by Mark Taylor titled “Tim O’Brien’s War”, he expresses a similar distortion and finds that the truth is distorted, even in O’Brien’s interviews.

“Even speaking in his own voice O’Brien tries to be similarly unsettling. In the Naparsteck interview he says of The Things They Carried, ‘It’s part nonfiction too: some of the stuff is commentary on the stories, talking about where a particular one came from. ‘Speaking of Courage,’ for example, came from a letter I received from a guy named Norman Bowker, a real guy, who committed suicide after I received his letter.’ Then, in his very next statement, O’Brien says that The Things They Carried is ‘a new form, I think. I blended my own personality with the stories, and I’m writing about the stories, and yet everything is made up, including the commentary. The story about Norman Bowker is made up. There was no Norman Bowker’” (Taylor 220-221)

Clearly, it’s up to the audience to decide what they want to believe. To what degree is the reader supposed to take this novel as factual? This is a postmodern novel, so whatever the audience wants to believe, is what the audience believes. In Tim O’Brien’s case, he is covering highly sensitive content, and another facet of this collections post-truth metaphysics could be working against his goal of “grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what happened to me” (O’Brien 151). Tim is not explaining what happened to him, he is using fake anecdotes to give the perception of fact, and the reader is supposed to trust his direction, that this is an accurate representation of what actually happened. 

In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary word of the year was “Post-Truth”. They defined it as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In The Things they Carried, Tim O’Brien expresses that war stories are exaggerations and distortion of the truth, seen through a lens of a survivor or biased storyteller. Post-truth can be dangerous for society because the factual events are being filtered through emotional perspectives. In modern times, the effects of post-truth have rippled through the generations to a potentially dangerous extent.

As Adalberto Palma wrote an article aptly titled, “When The Future Catches Up With Us, The Past Will No Longer Be Valid. Descartes Could Be a Yardstick”, that explains the modern issues with a post-truth society, and the danger it presents in the future. “Stating the facts today is not enough. It is now essential to involve the recipient in these facts, so that they display their ‘endorsement’ of them with a simple click and are able, like never before, to spread an opinion or new piece of information. This will find its way back to the market—whether true or false—to compete with information created by journalists”(Palma 18) While this statement criticizes journalists in 2019, the same argument could be made for The Things They Carried. If the reader is primarily receiving a retroactive post-truth perception of the Vietnam War through Tim O’Brien’s eyes, how are they sure it is the truth, and how are they sure it is accurate without being their themselves. Therefore, writing a short story like “Notes” that completely plays with the idea of nonfiction, and how fictionalized it can actually be is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. While blurring the truth helps Tim write, it also distorts the reader’s perspective of what actually happened at the Vietnam war. Another question that could come up for these implications is, “To what extent do witnesses of history have a responsibility to be as accurate as possible with their accounts?” For future generations, it is important to uphold the truth, but it is understandable that the nature of O’Brien’s truth is difficult to reproduce due to the trauma and violence behind it.

Tim O’Brien is telling the emotional truth, even if there are factual lies, and that is still incredibly valuable. Norman Bowker’s story is not a one off tale, but happened thousands of times in the country, ending with soldiers commiting suicide. Even Kiowa’s death, a story that Norman Bowker brings up in his letter is not a one off tale, because thousands of good men died. The amount of times Tim O’Brien saw any of the given events is debatable, but to face his trauma head on and give a memoir could possibly decimate his well being. In the case of The Things They Carried, the post-truth metaphysics of the book, although dangerous, are justified in this context.

In many ways, The Things They Carried is an emotion summary from the perspective of a Vietnam soldier who saw everything. Tim O’Brien is not attempting to contort the truth to give a skewed version of reality, but he is attempting to distort the truth to express what it was really like to be there. There is nothing in the novel to suggest he is using post-truth rhetoric to manipulate the audience, or make Vietnam seem anything more or less than it was. “Notes” is a great example of what Tim O’Brien is attempting to say through his metaphysical realities. He is explaining “exactly what happened to me”(O’Brien 151), and in any form that takes. This implies that Tim O’Brien’s version of post-truth is different than the given Oxford Definition. Tim is certainly not trying to shape the opinion of the audience, or take advantage of the audience because he is sharing a personal experience, and does not have insidious, backwards interests to contort his story. The reader should wonder if Tim is even sure he knows what happened for fact. After years of watching horror and death, how would they keep right and wrong straight?

At the end of the day, it is okay to question the truth. In some ways, it could chisel away the self bias and propagandizing governments attempt to do every year. Questioning the truth could help someone deal with comprehending a horrific situation, and it could help them put it into words. In the case of Tim O’Brien’s work, the proof is in the pudding. He is a well know rewriter and reviser of his work because he is still struggling with what happened and why. When he gets close to remembering, he is stricken with thoughts of guilt, depression, and suicide. Post-truth holds this novel together in quite a literal sense. Although there are potential dangers to injecting post-truth into a war story, in personal cases, it can help writers dissect the situation and figure out what actually happened to give the reader a sense of what it feels like. As Tim O’Brien writes in “Notes”, “Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable, process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication”(O’Brien 151). Tim O’Brien’s writing is not an historical document, it is in fact fictional through and through, but the source of these words he presents comes from a real emotional source. Norman Bowker’s letter is possibly a real source, watching his friends die, or hearing war stories is Tim O’Brien’s emotional source. Tim’s writing is such an personal experience, that readers who are, understandably, searching for facts, are going to come up empty handed because Tim O’Brien is writing his personal truth. The Things They Carried is most definitely a postmodern book, and it is rife with benign post-truth to tell the whole story.

WORKS CITED

Lee, Don. “About Tim O'Brien.” Ploughshares, vol. 21, no. 4, 1995, pp. 196–201. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/40354687.

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 4th Estate, 2019.

Palma, Adalberto. “WHEN THE FUTURE CATCHES UP WITH US, THE PAST WILL NO 

LONGER BE VALID. Descartes COULD BE A YARDSTICK.” UNO: Developing Ideas , vol. 27, 2017, pp. 17–19., doi:https://www.uno-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/UNO_27_ENG_alta.pdf.

Taylor, Mark. “TIM O'BRIEN'S WAR.” The Centennial Review, vol. 39, no. 2, 1995, pp. 

213–230. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23739136.