O’Brien plays with my expectations of what fiction is and consequently complicates my understanding of what reality is. The collision of fiction and reality takes place before the first story begins. The title page insists that The Things They Carried is “a work of fiction by Tim O’Brien.” He dedicates the book to “Alpha Company” and lists the names of recurring characters from the work. Were these guys real people? For the epigraph, O’Brien uses an actual excerpt from the actual diary of an actual Union soldier reflecting on his experiences in a Confederate prison; I had to look that one up, because I assumed O’Brien invented John Ransom (he didn’t). When people asked me what I was reading this summer, I often had to pause before my reply. It’s not quite a novel, a memoir, a collection of short stories. It seems like it’s all of those things. The way the work itself defies categorization makes me think of how O’Brien’s explorations of truth, courage, loyalty, responsibility, and memory force me to reconsider my assumptions about those concepts. I’m thinking in particular of the challenges he poses in “On the Rainy River” to conventional views of courage. The narrator Tim O’Brien (real guy or fictional creation?) describes himself as cowardly for going to war and calls into question the notion that fighting in a war is automatically courageous. I guess reading good fiction does help readers pose provocative questions and force them to reevaluate their perspectives on what is real.
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