O'Brien's Truth In Things

The first thought that came into my mind as I was reading the article was "WOW!! This is p-r-e-t-t-y long...." But I am glad I read it because it gave me an insight on O'Brien's strategy of demonstrating the Vietnam War stories to the readers. So now to the point, the article was to "show that Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried accords with much of the anti-totalizing strains of postmodernism, and I will argue that it is precisely this tendency in his fiction that makes it incapable of opposing the ongoing reconstruction of the war as an American tragedy." Jim Neilson practically makes The Things They Carried a victim for criticism. He has a lot of comparison about how anti the book is to postmodernism. Such as, "It is within this framework -- the belief that the war escapes understanding and representation and even makes us liars -- that O'Brien attempts to tell a true war story. There remains a tension throughout The Things They Carried, therefore, between O'Brien's affinity with postmodernism and his desire to tell the truth." Tim wants to get his war story across by conveying it as false in order to capture his audiences' emotions and make them feel how he felt because if he had just explained it straight up facts then there would not be that creative imagery he felt during the chaotic event. But the problem is that by doing so he portrays a identity of a liar which contradicts with postmodernism perhaps...?

Furthermore, this persuades me to side with the Jim instead of Tim because of all the literary analysis he rambled about made me understand that "O'Brien's imagination is virtually the only reality. O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese. In so doing, O'Brien has constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." Now as a reader I see how O'Brien produces his passages in a way to make the reader mostly see what the war is like and what it does to you, but he should have gone deeper with his repetitive stories and put an explanation to why that made him and his fellow comrades feel that way. With that then his stories would have contained a more broader idea of what actually happened in the Vietnam War.

Well, so far that's all I could think of about the article and its views on The Things They Carried feel free to give me more insight...GRACIAS!! =))))