Impossible Quest for Absolute Truth

Kaufmann, Michael. "The Solace of Bad Form: Tim O'Brien's Postmodernist Revisions of Vietnam in 'Speaking of Courage'." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46.4 (2005): 333-343. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCO. Web. 9 Dec. 2010.

Michael Kaufman claims O’Brien’s work expresses uncertainty about the Vietnam War, as a meditation on the process of writing and exploration of the possibilities of fiction. Kaufmann speaks of O’Brien’s style of more of an artwork rather than a piece of writing and he believes that O’Brien is faced with a lot of moral struggles throughout the construction of this piece. Kaufmann states that O’Brien struggles not only with the question of how to interrupt events, but also how to determine what those events were exactly. O’Brien was struggling with what these events actually were that he was trying to express to his readers, would he tell the story truth or the happening truth. Kaufmann also states that O’Brien is a postmodernist writer and that like all postmodernists writer, he “flaunts alternate histories” (335). In The Things They Carried, readers are directly told the exact problems and concerns in the book, for instance we are never told the exact nature of Bowker’s problem, but yet we are supposed to depict something out of the text. Kaufmann expresses the pieces that are left out in O’Brien’s works, and were done initially by O’Brien. For instance, O’Brien left the shit field out of the story and other times. We are forced to piece together the story of how Norman Bowker did not win a Silver Star. O’Brien is expressing an open admission of guilt which ultimately betters the work.

Michael Kaufmann’s views are those in which have more of an emotional ties to them. This article is important to read because the ideas of the emotional tragedies and guilt O’Brien felt is repeatedly expressed. Also, by reading this article readers may now be able to ultimately question O’Brien and what exactly is he trying to do with his stories, are they for his own personal benefit or what. This article will allow readers to branch off with different ideas about O’Brien’s emotional state of mind during the war. This article may leave the reader pondering ideas because the right and the wrong truth, or the fact that there is not a true truth. The idea of Postmodernism is expressed in this article which always the reader to get a better sense of the background and historical atmosphere that O’Brien was writing in. By understanding his circumstances expressed in this article, the reader may be understand O’Brien’s reasoning behind his writing as a whole and ultimately they connection in which he is trying to make between storytelling and truth.