Identifying Truth Through Imagination

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In 2004 I had the opportunity to hear Tim O'Brien speak at the University of Akron. His lecture's overarching message illustrated his belief that fiction, while a product of a novelist's imagination and not true in the literal sense, gets closer to the meaning of emotional and spiritual truth. To illustrate the connection between his imagined "story truth" and the literal "happening truth," O'Brien quoted Pablo Picasso: "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." One only needs to read O'Brien's chapter "How to Tell a True War Story" to see how he puts Picasso's theory to work. In this particular chapter O'Brien relies on imagination, ambiguity, and paradox to tell and then reinvent (three different times) how the narrator, Tim, remembers the accidental death of Curt Lemon, a fellow soldier in his platoon. After the first telling, O'Brien explains why what he remembers is an imagined truth rather than the literal truth.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from Replica A Lange & Sohne ...
... what seemed to happen. What seems to happen become happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

O'Brien then explains in the same chapter that in addition to the imagination taking over in stressful situations when the literal truth overloads both the senses and the mind, an unchecked imagination, especially during war, can play tricks on the mind and cause its victims to react in an irrational manner. The narrator recounts a story another soldier in his platoon told him about six guys who "lie down and wait" "deep in the bush" for seven days. They begin to imagine music, a cocktail party, and then the rock, fog, and grass all seem to be speaking. "The guys can't cope. They lose it. They get on the radio and report enemy movement—a whole army, they say—and they order up firepower".

Whether the imagination is helping soldiers discover truths or inducing panic, one thing is for certain—the imagination plays a pivotal role in the everyday lives of these soldiers and for the author—a Vietnam veteran himself—who relied on his imagination to save his life through his stories. Later, in the chapter "Notes," O'Brien explains how he, unlike many Vietnam veterans including the character Norman Bowker, escaped post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms such as flashbacks and midnight sweats. In fact, O'Brien was able to move seamlessly on to graduate school and a civilian life after returning home because he could engage his imagination in retelling and reinventing stories that helped him to cope with the excessive stresses of war.

In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication.... By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened . . . and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact Replica Tag Heuer Carrera occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Undoubtedly, imagination was the key factor in O'Brien's repatriation, and though he didn't realize it at the time, it served as the "medicine" he needed to circumvent the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, he relied on his imagination throughout The Things They Carried to craft fictional stories that clarify the human experience related to war. His inventive stories serve as a type of therapy to heal the mind from the angst-filled moments of war while explaining the wide range of emotions associated with battlefield experiences. A soldier's fears, love, memories, sorrows, and loneliness are what matter most in war—not the actual battles or fighting. While objectifying his experience and sorting through his emotions, O'Brien illuminates the importance of a soldier's imagined recollections—to more fully understand the emotional costs of war rather than focusing on the controversy. He establishes the significance of imagination in the healing process that is necessary after being subjected to heightened emotional stress.