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The Things They Reviewed
Oct. 11th, 2013 03:12 pmHey,
So, normally I'm not a huge fan of short story collections and I prefer first-hand accounts of soldiers in combat vs. fictionalized accounts. So it was with some surprise that I found myself roaring through The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
Yeah, it's a collection of short stories based on the author's experiences in Vietnam. They cover time in combat, out of combat, before and after going to world and the stories all revolve around the same platoon of soldiers giving a continuity to the stories. Usually, the author is the narrator and the POV character, but other soldiers take center stage from time to time.
There is one small nit to pick here. The author stresses that these aren't real people. these things didn't happen, he talks about killing a guy but he didn't actually kill that guy. All of this to say that just telling you what happened doesn't convey the truth of his experiences, but through these stories, he can maybe illustrate it batter. The problem is that he keeps revising, keeps revisiting the same event but telling it in a new way, and at some point you start to wonder if he ever was in a firefight, if he ever went out on patrol, if he was ever in Vietnam (he was, I checked). He starts to undermine the power of his story-truth. I just wanted to say "look, you tell the story as authentically as you can, fact or fiction and I will listen as hard as I can and we'll probably still fail to communicate the thing you want to say, but just tell your story".
Because when he tells those stories, they're pretty interesting.
later
Tom
So, normally I'm not a huge fan of short story collections and I prefer first-hand accounts of soldiers in combat vs. fictionalized accounts. So it was with some surprise that I found myself roaring through The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.
Yeah, it's a collection of short stories based on the author's experiences in Vietnam. They cover time in combat, out of combat, before and after going to world and the stories all revolve around the same platoon of soldiers giving a continuity to the stories. Usually, the author is the narrator and the POV character, but other soldiers take center stage from time to time.
There is one small nit to pick here. The author stresses that these aren't real people. these things didn't happen, he talks about killing a guy but he didn't actually kill that guy. All of this to say that just telling you what happened doesn't convey the truth of his experiences, but through these stories, he can maybe illustrate it batter. The problem is that he keeps revising, keeps revisiting the same event but telling it in a new way, and at some point you start to wonder if he ever was in a firefight, if he ever went out on patrol, if he was ever in Vietnam (he was, I checked). He starts to undermine the power of his story-truth. I just wanted to say "look, you tell the story as authentically as you can, fact or fiction and I will listen as hard as I can and we'll probably still fail to communicate the thing you want to say, but just tell your story".
Because when he tells those stories, they're pretty interesting.
later
Tom
