The Short Story - I Sing of Arms and the Man

I Sing of Arms and the Man

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Dr. Bordelon's The Short Story: On Campus

I Sing of Arms and the Man

Titles, Page Numbers and date publisher
"The Things They Carried" (1253 or 1188); "How to Tell a True War Story" (posted online at http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/pdocs/obrien_story.pdf); "Good Form" (search "Good Form") Published 1990.

Introduction
This assignment takes its title from the first line of Vergil's epic poem The Aeneid, a nationalistic work which recounts the fall of Troy and the birth of the Roman Empire. While the poem is filled with the clang of sword on shield and the hot scent of blood, the life of the "man," in this case Aeneas (the proto-Roman hero) is equally important. Throughout his journeys, Aeneas espouses the mores valued by the Romans – loyalty, courage, morality, honor – and the story becomes a tale, not of war, but of the birth of a national consciousness. Oddly, one of the most commonly excerpted section of the epic, retold in opera, lyric poetry, and fictional forms, recounts the story of his tragic love for Queen Dido. Thus, woven into a jingoistic tale of the founding of Rome is a love story. In the stories we'll be reading in this section, we see a similar of mix of love and national consciousness.

But in contrast to The Aeneid, (a story replete with visions of, to borrow an Americanism, "manifest destiny") we see war in these two stories on a less grand, more humbling scale. Bringing it down in size accentuates the human dimension of combat, making O’Brien’s stories less about killing and more about the minds of those involved in the fray. Because it's literally a life or death situation, a war setting allows writers to place extra emphasis on the decisions people make. Morals, actions, or hesitations all become concentrated and imbued with tension when the stakes are so high.

The stories here (note "Ambush" and "Good Form" in packet as well) are from a collection entitled The Things They Carried. A collection of interlocked stories and commentaries (or is it a novel?), the tales follow a fictional infantry unit, Alpha Company, through the eyes of a narrator, Tim O'Brien. The narrator Tim O'Brien, as he makes clear in a number of interviews, is not the same as the author Tim O'Brien, but a fictional construct who just happens to share the name and some of the beliefs of the "real" O'Brien. This playing with the idea of real and fictional is part of his goal to reveal the "story truth" – which he feels most accurately conveys what occurs in any given situation – from the "happening truth" ("Good Form" 203) – what seemed to have physically occurred. For O'Brien this is no mere game: one of the ideas he is exploring is the different way we experience seemingly objective reality. Once an act happens, it is stored in our memory, and memory is notoriously unreliable. For example, that time you were in a car accident, just when did you hit the brakes? How fast were you really going . . . ? Questions such as these plague us because they occur at the strange juncture of "truth" and memory, a juncture fraught with peril.

As you read these stories, pay attention not only to the horror of war, but to the many different kinds of love man is capable of, the way time warps our perceptions of events, the nature of reality, the meaning of that elusive and slippery term truth, the Janus face of imagination, and the overweening power of mystery. This last element O'Brien deems essential to good fiction. As he notes in an essay entitled "The Magic Show," "A satisfying plot, I believe, involves not a diminution of mystery but rather a fundamental enlargement. As in scientific endeavor, the solution to one set of problems must open out into another and even greater set. The future must still matter. The unknown must still issue its call. One tomorrow must imply the next" ("The Magic" 181). Keep your eyes open for the mystery of these stories.

Works Cited

O'Brien, Tim. "The Magic Show." Writers on Writing. Ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini.

Hanover, New Hampshire: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 175-183.

---. The Things They Carried. New York: Penguin, 1991.
One of the decade's best short story collections.

Questions to mull over as you interpret the story

"The Things They Carried"

Besides the material objects, what else do the men carry? Are these intangible things important to the story? Which are more important, the material or the immaterial "things"?
How are attitudes about the war revealed by the characters – both the soldiers and those at home? Point to specific places where the soldier's comments or actions, or comments by the narrator reveal this.
What are some of the surprising things they carry? What is signified by the profusion of things carried by these men? How are the different characters revealed by what they carried? Describe, for example, Jimmy Cross, Ted Lavender, and Kiowa.
What relation does Martha have to the situation in Vietnam? Why does Lieutenant Cross burn her letters and picture?
In a "war story" the climax is usually a battle, with good triumphing over evil (or in the more "realistic" stories, no clear winners), but what's the climax here? Is this story "about" Lavender's death?
Why give away that Ted Lavender will be killed in the story so early? Isn't this giving away the plot? And why are the details of his death revealed in layers?

"How to Tell a True War Story"

Modern short fiction often plays with the conventions of narrative, deliberately chopping up the flow of the story. But does "How To" still have the traditional features of fiction? A climax? Conflict? Or is it a "How to" essay?
Both of these stories in some way deal with letters – why? Why were letters so important? What do they represent in the stories? Do they have the same function in each story?
What purpose does the opening anecdote about the letter and the sister serve?
What is the function of violence in this story? Is it merely to shock the reader?
Why does he keep saying "This is true" (para 1), "It's all exactly true" (para 12), "God's truth" (para 22) etc. Do you believe the incidents he's discussing actually happened? Does the constant appeal to "truth" undercut the "truthfulness" of the actions? Why or why not?
Consider the relevance of the following quote to the entire story: "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth" (89). How does this relate to 1) the story itself; 2) the nature of story telling in general?
Which "True" is he talking about in the title – the "happening-truth" or the "story-truth" ("Good Form" 203 [15 in packet])? How can you tell – or not tell? Does O'Brien feel this distinction is important? Why or why not?

Group Questions

Question #1 "Things"
Besides the material objects, what else do the men carry? Are these intangible things important to the story? Which are more important, the material or the immaterial "things"?

Question #2 "Things"
What relation does Martha have to the situation in Vietnam? Why does Lieutenant Cross burn her letters and picture?

Question #3 "Things"
In a "war story" the climax is usually a battle, with good triumphing over evil (or in the more "realistic" stories, no clear winners), but what's the climax here? Is this story ("Things") "about" Lavender's death? Or is it about ____?

Question #4 "How To"
Modern short fiction often plays with the conventions of narrative, deliberately chopping up the flow of the story. But does "How To" still have the traditional features of fiction? A climax? Conflict? Or is it a "How to" essay? Explain please.

Question #5 "How To"
Consider the relevance of the following quote to the entire story: "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth" (89). How does this relate to 1) the story itself; 2) the nature of story telling in general?

Question #6 "How To"
Which "True" is he talking about in the title – the "happening-truth" or the "story-truth" ("Good Form" 203 [story in packet])? How can you tell – or not tell? Does O'Brien feel this distinction is important? Why or why not?

What the author/critics say

"The Vietnam War affords a familiar moral and physical terrain that engenders inherent intensity, conflict, and genuine emotions. As a writer, therefore, he doesn't not have to work at creating these elements in a story but instead can explore deeper moral, political, and human issues that are timeless and not confined to the battlefield. The subject of war becomes a starting point for O'Brien's self-described quest for 'everness' and 'alwaysness' to his writing. Consequently, his broad themes relate to his ultimate goal of having his works contribute to 'understanding the war of the living' – individuals' daily struggles with issues of conscience, despair, deteriorating relationships, evil, temptation, moral dilemmas, self-discovery, and, of course, mortality. And at the heart of an O'Brien story is the mystery that is related to these characters, outcomes, and truths and that is ultimately shared by readers and the author. This underlying focus of O'Brien's writing is what Catherine Calloway labels a postmodernist interest in the 'problematic nature of reality, a process that engages both the protagonist and the reader'" (Herzog 24).

O'Brien in an interview: "Time is scrambled in our memories and in our imaginations and in our dreams . . . . We don't remember events, most of us, always in chronological order" (qtd. in Herzog 22)

Herzog, Tobey, C. Tim O'Brien. Twayne's United States Authors Series No. 691. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

"Beyond anything, I think, a writer is someone entranced by the power of language to create a magic show of the imagination, to make the dead sit up and talk, to shine light into the darkness of the great human mysteries" (O'Brien 177)

O'Brien, Tim. "The Magic Show." Writers on Writing. Ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini. Hanover, New Hampshire: Middlebury College Press, 1991. 175-183.