Throughout his novel The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien plays with our ideas about truth. Of course, he says he is not playing at but trying to expose the reader to the life he lived for a year while a foot soldier in Vietnam. It was a year of ambiguity, confusion, and lack of truth. A year when "the old rules were no longer binding." While O'Brien illustrates the number of burdens soldiers had to carry, among the heaviest was the feeling that truth no longer existed except in on way: they would never be at a loss for violence. And people would not understand.
1.
We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. They are the signal within the noise.
We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. They are the signal within the noise.
2.
Can I ever really understand somebody else's story? Or my own?
3.
[The] intention was to capture the experience of combat, boredom and fear through the eyes of the soldiers themselves. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one's political beliefs. Beliefs are a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.
4.
Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
5.
6.
If you don't care for obscenity you don't care for the truth.
7.
What's obscene is ideology--the hardening of opinion into stubborn belief. With ideology, one no longer has to think. With ideologies, stories become brittle.
8.
It has become a kind of rule that neatness counts in narrative: don't leave the audience wondering.
9.
10.
Once I read an essay by Jacques Barzun. He said no truths last forever. Humans are truth-seekers, but they are even better truth-inventors.
11.
The letters weighed 10 ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lt. Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant.
12.
I remember Mitchell Sanders smiling as he told me that story. Most of it he made up, I'm sure, but even so it gave me a quick truth-goose. Because it's all relative.
13.
Almost everything is invented.
14.
Don't ask me nothin' about nothin'
I just might tell you the truth.
15.
Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs
16.
There it absolutely and positively and f***ing well is.
. . .
1 Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, comments on Restrepo
2 Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion
4 Wislawa Szymborska, "The End and The Beginning"
5 Nick Ut
6 Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
8 Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative
11-13 Tim O'Brien
14 Bob Dylan, "Tom Thumb's Blues"
15 The Minutemen, "Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs"
16 Tim O'Brien
