Going Straight to the Source

Smith, Jack. "The things he carries: For Tim O'Brien, the Vietnam War has remained a crucible in his fiction, but the power of imagination and memory, and 'our elusive interior worlds,' loom large, too." Writer 123.7 (2010): 16-47. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 6 Dec. 2010.

In his interview with Tim O’Brien, Smith is able to discover and understand “the power of the imagination” as O’Brien desires of readers. Smith is interested in understanding O’Brien and why he chooses to use the style of writing that he does. In this interview, Smith attempts to comprehend O’Brien’s rare writing technique and to discover the truth behind O’Brien’s reasoning for creating such puzzling and profound characters in his novels. By interviewing the source of the secrets behind the novel, O’Brien himself, Smith is able to uncover many untold truths and to solve a number of questions that readers of The Things They Carried may have had. Smith aims to interpret and comprehend O’Brien’s “many dimensions-mixing the tragic, the comic and the poignant”- of writing.

Smith’s interview lights the way for readers trying to understand O’Brien and his novels. Instead of critiquing The Things They Carried as a whole and trying to decipher it alone, Smith goes straight to the source in his attempt to understand and clarify Tim O’Brien and his novel(s). By doing so, readers now know just what O’Brien’s goal was when creating such an ambiguous, yet extremely clever novel. O’Brien’s use of “story truth” and “happening truth” can create uncertainty for readers; in the interview, O’Brien explains that he wanted “to explore multiple planes of ‘reality’ and multiple planes of ‘truth’." He also states that “reality--or what we call reality--has traveled through the human mind and come out the other end as a blur.” These two statements signify that O’Brien realizes truth is what the mind makes it to be, not what it is in actuality. By now knowing this, readers are no longer left in the dark about O’Brien’s use of “truth.” They can now see that O’Brien was trying to accomplish a sense of reality by creating two truths, because actual truth is a blur of “story truth” and “happening truth.” Not only does this light the way for readers to now understand the two truths and how they are used in The Things They Carried, they also have an idea as to why O’Brien uses both truths in the novel. O’Brien states in the interview that “a good story is a mix of the so-called real world and a much more mysterious and elusive interior world we all live in.” This idea could lead readers to believe that O’Brien was simply creating a “good story” while also opening reader’s eyes to the actuality of reality. Smith’s interview with O’Brien opens new doors for the imagination and for the “truth-confused” readers by explaining how he values storytelling.