War Literature: O'Brien and Turner on Disillusionment

Introduction

In Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and the stand-alone chapter "The Man I Killed," the main character is a noble soldier who is disillusioned by the harsh realities of war. In Brian Turner's poems "Here, Bullet" and "Sadiq," the same theme is prevalent. While O'Brien's novel takes place during the Vietnam War and Turner's poems are set during the Iraq War, both works capture the agonizing distress involved in fighting for a cause that is not fully understood by either side.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried is told from a semi-fictional autobiographical perspective in which the main character is so personal to the author that he bears O'Brien's own name. This is deliberate: through a first-person perspective, the complexities of the main character and his experiences can be infinitely explored. It is for this same reason that O'Brien's novel is so intricately ordered, as opposed to following a straightforward storytelling style. By jumping from past to present and from storytelling to commentary on storytelling, O'Brien not only illustrates the complexities of war through plot and character development, but through literary style as well.

O'Brien writes: "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience" (O'Brien 158). By telling many interrelated yet non-sequential stories, the author is not only objectifying his own experience, but that of the reader. We become as bemused as he is about which events are told accurately and which are merely perceived as accurate. O'Brien has also stated that he is "a believer in the power of stories whether they're true, or embellished, or exaggerated, or utterly made up. A good story has a power that . . . transcends the question of factuality or actuality" (Lomperis 53).

This literary tactic would be an implausible component in a more unambiguous, third-person storytelling style, because that type of narration leaves no room for question or doubt as to its authenticity in relaying the experiences of the characters. O'Brien, on the other hand, not only encourages interpretation but also provides the reader with his views about what those interpretations might be. For example, in the chapter "How to Tell a True War Story," O'Brien essentially tells the reader outright that any interpretation of war or war stories other than as a manifestation of evil is erroneous:

"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil" (O'Brien 68–69).

Not only does O'Brien expose the discrepancies between false perceptions of nobility and the harsh realities associated with war, but he emphasizes this point by interweaving fantasy and reality — something he considers an essential ingredient in any war novel. In a 1982 interview with the Chicago Review, O'Brien explained that an element of fantasy is necessary in order to absorb the true horrors of war:

"In war, the rational faculty begins to diminish . . . And what takes over is surrealism, the life of the imagination. The mind of the soldier becomes part of the experience — the brain seems to flow out of your head, joining the elements around you on the battlefield. It's like stepping outside yourself. War is a surreal experience, therefore it seems quite natural and proper for a writer to render some of its aspects in a surreal way" (McCaffery 135).

The Man I Killed

The "surreal way" in which O'Brien relays the experiences of war is representative of the detached feelings that often accompany the witnessing of tragedy. Many people placed in harrowing situations describe the event as if they were having an out-of-body experience — as if they were a third party watching themselves from the outside. Thus, O'Brien uses his deliberate confusion between reality and fantasy not only as a literary device, but also as a way of conveying the detached mindset that is necessary to mentally survive the unspeakable acts he is forced both to observe and to participate in.

"The Man I Killed" is the tenth chapter in O'Brien's The Things They Carried, but it is so profound that it is often analyzed as a stand-alone piece of literature. The chapter is essentially the protagonist's confession of a murder to which he attaches a surplus of guilt by reconstructing his victim's life in his own mind. By imagining what the man's life must have been like, he views his victim as an actual human being rather than just a target. The government sees only targets and numbers, but the people fighting the war see real individuals who have dreams, who write poetry, and who fall in love — just like themselves.

While O'Brien could have painted the man he killed as an evil barbarian in order to relieve his guilt, he surprisingly chooses to portray him as an innocent farmer's son who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. One would think that this portrayal would make the protagonist feel even worse, yet for some inexplicable reason it seems to comfort him more than it distresses him. This is not to say that he does not feel extreme guilt for the killing. It is simply striking the manner in which he chooses to deal with it, since the most natural way to assuage guilt would seem to be telling yourself that the man deserved to die. Perhaps, however, O'Brien is not looking to assuage his guilt. Perhaps he wants to experience his remorse to its fullest depths, ensuring that he does not become an uncaring, unfeeling beast as some of his comrades had.

Conclusion

While O'Brien chooses to express his experiences through prose and Turner chooses poetry as his medium, the sentiments being relayed are remarkably similar. Each of the literary works discussed here demonstrates that it does not matter where a war is being fought, or when, or by whom. The fact remains, as O'Brien asserts, that "A true war story is never moral" (O'Brien 68). War is, by its very nature, barbaric, treacherous, and immoral. Whether you are fighting in Vietnam, Iraq, or anywhere else, "It should make you shake and sweat, nightmare you, strand you in a desert of irrevocable desolation" (Turner, "Sadiq," 2005).