Post responses to the following questions. This discussion should be beneficial to your final assessment options.
The story Rat tells in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" is highly fantastical. Does its lack of believeability make it any less compelling? Do you believe it? Does it fit O'Brien's criteria for a true war story?
In "Good Form", O'Brien casts doubt on the veracity of the entire novel. Why does he do so? Does it make you more or less interested in the novel? Does it increase or decrease your understanding? What is the difference between "story truth" and "happening truth"?
On the copyright page of the novel appears the following: "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary." Why do you feel O'Brien chose to write this book as fiction? Why does he call the book fiction when so many of the stories seem autiobiographical? What is the relationship between facts and truth?
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I think the story Rat tells is even more compelling because it has elements of fantasy in it. Fantasy is made to draw people into a story when they might otherwise not be. I believed the majority of it, and I liked all the seemingly exaggerated details of the story. I think this story fits perfectly with O'Brien's criteria for a true war story. At first it didn't because Rat added his personal bias, but after he stopped doing that, he really pulled people into the story and got them completely immersed in it. It was so compelling that it got me, as a reader, to believe everything that was being said. Rat later admitted to making parts up, but he got the people listening to believe everything was true, so he succeeded at getting people to hang on his every word and believe him. They didn't question what he told them until after he said he had created some parts himself afterwords.
ReplyDeleteI think O'Brien casts doubt on the truthfulness of the novel to continue supporting the point that everything ever said about a war is not entirely truthful. War has such a profound impact on people that they can't help but add a little bit of their own personal feelings and experiences into a story about the war. He wants the readers of the novel to understand that even what HE is saying is not entirely truthful. It's an interesting point that he makes, but part of me wishes that everything he says about the Vietnam war is true because the stories are so interesting. It decreases my understanding of the novel somewhat because now I don't know what to distinguish as real and fake. The difference between "story truth" and "happening truth" is that the happening truth is what actually happened. The story truth is for when people are telling others about what happened to them and the others that were with them, but addind new details to the story, ultimately making it more interesting. The story truth is known for having a more serious effect on people and adding more emotion to the story.
On the page after this, O'Brien says that the book is "lovingly dedicated" to his friends, including Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa. I can only see the stories that included all these men to be real and not imaginary. I think he wrote this book as fiction because, just like war stories, it is not a true story if it has personal bias added to it. The novel is narrated by O'Brien, making it a war story with outside information. Maybe he thought it was the right thing to do when writing a story about war from his point of view. He calls the book fiction because it has his imput, and the least he could do was put it as that, in remembrance of the things he left out and changed about the lives of his friends that passed away/were negatively affected during the war. I think truth is subjective. It is defined by an individual's morals and what they believe is right. Facts are universally accepted ideas that the majority of people in the world "believe" to be right. Truth is automatically the facts in an individual's opinion, because they have justified it and proven it right to themselves.
Consider the possibility that O'Brien could conceivably be "thanking" his fictional characters for bringing this collection to life. I can easily imagine a novelist doing this.
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