I find it interesting that after reading these two war books
that are marked as fiction, I’m more inclined to want to believe that things
actually happened in The Things They Carried
more than in Fire and Forget. I sorta
took for granted that in Fire and Forget,
all the characters in the stories were fictional. I just assumed that the
character’s life was entirely constructed by a writer who knew enough about the
war through experience to think of a story that was plausible. In The Things They Carried, O’Brian talks about
his life writing these stories, which brings us out of this fictional world, and
makes us question it in a way that Fire and Forget never did, with each story
being written by a different author and having no plot connection to each
other. Now that I’m reading through The
Things They Carried, I’m starting to wonder how much of Fire and Forget could be based on actual
happenings to the writers.
Tim O’Brien succeeds in making us want to believe that these
characters actually experienced these things in war in real life. Fire and Forget lets us believe that
these sort of things happened in war instead of these events actually happening.
Tim O’Brian succeeds in making us feel, and then takes away the sliver of what we believed was the
truth, knowing that the feeling and reaction we got from the story is
permanent. For me, I feel like having one steady narrator through most of The Things They Carried is driving home
what war is actually like more than the individuals in Fire and Forget did. It
is almost that through the connected plots, we’re able to connect to O’Brian
more and therefore are more willing to try to feel what he felt in depth and
share those feelings his character had at the time in the book. I felt that in Fire and Forget I was mostly feeling
sympathy, while The Things They Carried
made me feel sad, angry, and lots more.
After reading both of these books, I wonder If the authors of Fire and Forget read "How to Write a True War Story." I think it is likely that they did since O'Brien is well known and emerging authors writing about war, such as those in the workshop that produced so much of Fire and Forget, would likely find this story very important. However, without anything like O'Briens meta-chapters we cannot really know whether or not the authors of Fire and Forget thought about war fiction in the same way as O'Brien.
ReplyDeleteI agree! I think O'Brien really sought to translate his experiences and feelings into stories that we can understand and empathize with. It's clear that each story presented to us has a lot of thought behind it, like its something he's thought about and grappled with for years and years. On the other hand, Fire and Forget seemed like a more informative read, in that we got to examine another perspective on the wars in the Middle East or society's attitudes towards veterans. But they didn't seem to be infused with the same depth of feeling, as O'Brien's book was.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with your point! To add onto that, Tim includes himself and the names of his real life friends into his stories: he even dedicates the book to "Kiowa, Ted, Rat Kiley, etc." For some reason, I just felt closer to "The Things they Carried", and from that a lot more respect. Even though O'Brien's writing style is based off of Hemingway's, I can firmly say that I prefer O'Brien's writings better. Why? Probably because of his frankness: the characters in the stories make you kinda want to be "bros" with them, for example we can see Curt as the shy guy, Ted as the scared guy, Azar as that one class clown, and Bobby as the "noob" on the team when playing a video game - it all just seems so real and relate-able (is that a word?). For "Fire and Forget", I can't really say that I can relate to a women who's trying to hide the fact that another man kissed her from her husband. As for Hemingway, it's kind of like "ew the women's annoying and the man's lame", and I really just don't want to associate with them - some of the stories make me kind of angry, but I suppose it shows that Hemingway's stories are effective in bringing out my emotions. I almost wanted to call O'Brien out for being sincere for coming into the book as himself and talking directly to us, but then I remembered that he came in the story to remind us that the stories we were so attached to were all non-factual - thanks a lot. I still feel betrayed, but we know that the book is fiction, so I really don't know how to respond to that.
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