Finding What's Definite in the Unclear

Kaplan, Steven. “The undying certainty of the narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.” Critique 35.1 (1993): 43. Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 1 Dec. 2010.

After researching and scrutinizing The Things They Carried, Kaplan’s opinion of the ambiguous novel is that readers will never fully know the hazy, indefinite “truths” of the Vietnam War or the novel itself. Kaplan examines and explores the way O’Brien uses storytelling to explain truth in The Things They Carried and facts about the Vietnam War. He looks at the way O’Brien questions truth and reality and how he handles and deciphers between fact and fiction. Kaplan struggles with the question of whether “these stories and the characters in them are real or imaginary, or does the ‘truth’ hover somewhere between the two?” He answers by examining the novel’s “narrative structure” and comes to the conclusion that O’Brien is unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary “because the very act of writing fiction about the war… is determined… ultimately by life in general where ‘the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity’.” By determining this, Kaplan begins to understand (in his opinion) that O’Brien cannot create certainty nor distinguish between fact and fiction. Ultimately, Kaplan comes to the conclusion that readers will never fully know the “truth” to the war or behind O’Brien’s ambiguous writing because readers did not experience the war. O’Brien explains “that it is impossible to know ‘exactly what had happened’”, which backs Kaplan’s opinion that the novel can never be fully understood. Kaplan concludes that we will never know “the undying uncertainty” of the war or the novel.

The way Kaplan approaches and addresses the uncertainty of “truth” in The Things They Carried reveals and attempts to answer a number of questions O’Brien creates in the novel. O’Brien’s stories are problematic in regards to understanding the Vietnam War and what actually happened in Vietnam; he creates uncertainty by stating facts and then questioning the truth behind them. Kaplan states that “storytelling in this book is something in which ‘the whole world is rearranged’ (39) in an effort to get at the ‘full truth’ (49) about events.” This statement reflects one way that O’Brien ties truth and storytelling together to create an unclear, yet distinct (in style), story. Kaplan also suggests that “the reader is thus made fully aware of being made a participant in a game… and thereby also is asked to become immediately involved in the incredibly frustrating act of trying to make sense of events.” By becoming participants, readers are forced to decipher events and understand them, yet it is difficult because of the way O’Brien handles truth. This article concludes with the idea that readers will never fully know the truth behind the war- whether O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is an actual depiction of the war or just a story with little truth behind it, but reading the article can provide insight as to why O’Brien created such uncertainty in The Things They Carried.