What is True?

            In the story “Good Form” Tim O’Brien 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. Almost everything else is invented.” O’Brien makes it clear in this story, and in others, that he sees a distinct difference between the “truth” he is trying to convey and what actually happened. But can we still see his “truth” if we know that he made everything up?

            O’Brien says that you can tell a true war story by “its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” He also says that “it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.” Many of his stories seem to be based, at least in part, on a factual event, but O’Brien is willing to stray far from reality in order to express the feelings he is trying to get across. He says, “I want you to feel what I felt.” He isn’t trying to write about the facts about what happened to him in Vietnam, he is writing about how it felt to be a soldier in Vietnam; A feeling that he says would be recognizable to other soldiers that were there. O’Brien gives us a view of the war filtered through his perception so that even if we don’t know what actually happened, we know how he felt.

           O’Brien makes these motivations, of trying to show us how it feels, clear. He tells us that certain stories are passed on from things he heard or saw in the war and not just things that happened to him. But it can hard to continue believing in any truth when every detail that he tells us is later said to be a lie. He tells us that he killed a man outside My Khe and describes the soldier’s appearance and backstory in intimate detail, but later he says that it wasn’t actually him that killed the man but that his presence was guilt enough. Then, when we get past that betrayal and accept that he hadn’t killed the man himself but was just trying to convey the guilt, he says that even that version is made up and lays out another.

           So how long can we continue to believe? O’Brien constantly undermines his own authority as a narrator by telling us that his stories have not been true. And yet, he continues to ask us to believe him and trust that there is a valuable feeling that he is trying to convey to us. I want to believe him, I can easily suspend my disbelief when reading a fiction story; but when the foundations of every story are pulled out from under them, it is hard to continue to believe the next story he has to tell.