Fragments of story and truth

I picked up a copy of The Things They Carried this week and read it straight through. It was even better and more moving and more well-written that I had remembered--I honestly think it's close to a perfect book. I need to own a copy.

There were a couple of passages in particular that I felt the need to copy and post here, because they do a much better job than my feeble attempt at re-creation to explain what O'Brien was talking about last week.

From "Spin":

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.


From "Good Form":

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Here is the happening truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

"Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say. "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say, honestly, "Of course not."

Or I can say, honestly, "Yes."

But if you're only going to read a few parts, read "On the Rainy River" and "Speaking of Courage" and "Field Trip." And the part about the baby buffalo in "How to Tell a True War Story," even though it'll make you feel like a jerk for being like the women at the readings and being as affected by the description of a buffalo's death as of a soldier's.