Analysis Of The Use Of Postmodernism And Metafiction By Tim O’Brien In The Things They Carried
“The Things They Carried” is a book comprised of a collection of linked short stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War written by author Tim O’Brien. The book describes in detail what life is like in war and the emotional and physical impacts it can have on those involved. The narrator, Tim O’Brien, describes the things all the men of the company carry. They are things in the most physical sense — mosquito repellent and marijuana, pocket knives and chewing gum. The things they carry depend on several factors, including the men’s priorities and their constitutions. The author uses these items to provide insight into the emotional burdens that these soldiers bear. Tim O’Brien is both the author of this book and a character in the book, describing his memories of war as a young foot soldier. He uses the techniques of postmodernism and metafiction to achieve distinct rhetorical goals. His primary rhetorical goals in writing this book are to tell a war story and to explore the purpose of storytelling itself. He examines the misconceptions and truths surrounding the experience of war and the telling of the stories about it.
Metafiction is used frequently in the book to achieve rhetorical goals. Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art. Often, it includes a story within a story, but it can also feature direct commentary on the art of creating fiction. In either case, metafiction reminds readers that they are reading a book or watching a play or movie as opposed to letting them get lost in the story. Tim O'Brien is portrayed in two different ways: as the young foot soldier fighting in Vietnam and the middle-aged writer coping with the traumatizing experiences of his youth. He says, 'I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier”. He frequently talks to the reader directly like when he said “As a foot soldier, I was shot twice. The first time, out by Tri Binh, it knocked me against the pagoda wall, and I bounced and spun around and ended up on Rat Kiley's lap. A lucky thing, because Rat was the medic. He tied on a compress and told me to ease back, then ran off toward the fighting. For a long time I lay there all alone, listening to the battle, thinking I've been shot, I've been shot..'. This quote shows the thoughts and feelings of a young foot soldier recounted many years later. Throughout the novel O'Brien points out how most war stories are untrue. He also talks to the reader directly many times throughout the novel. 'Right here, now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough”. In this quote the author is speaking to the reader directly and describing the emotional turmoil he experienced. He shows you that the book is fictional even though it is based on a true story. He writes about himself as a character in the book to show the strategy of fiction versus reality.
Another example of a passage in which O’Brien speaks to the reader directly is 'a true war story is never moral. It 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. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie”. Here the author does not mean that none of the people in the war are moral but that war itself destroys morality. Tim O’Brien also uses the theme of postmodernism to convey his rhetorical goals.
Postmodernism in literature is defined by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and is often (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era. The book has no plot, but rather is a bunch of different stories that the author experienced in war. One story that deliberately presents the confusing relationship between fact and fiction, it is 'How to Tell a True War Story,' where at the end, the author admits that the story he has just told was not true as he struggles to convey the experience of war: “Beginning to end, you tell her, it's all made up. Every goddamn detail--the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it”. O'Brien offers abstract commentary on storytelling and blurs the divisions between truth and fiction through a series of paradoxical reversals. The primary examples are the paragraphs that begin and end the chapter. O'Brien immediately states the story as true. In a direct address to readers he claims, 'this is true.' In the final paragraphs, he reverses this claim by redefining truth. 'None of it happened,' he writes, 'none of it.' The author seems to be drawing a distinction between truth and fabrication and focusing on the way that good stories contain a force or power regardless of whether they are fact or fiction. Tim O’Brien used various techniques of postmodernism and metafiction to help the reader understand particular aspects of the Vietnam War. Throughout his book, O'Brien described the overall mood of the war and the soldiers involved. 'The Things They Carried' posed many aspects of the burdens that the soldiers “carried” both emotionally and physically.
