The Power of Storytelling

Stories have a very important role in society. They affect people in a way nothing else could. Every story, by nature, has a message. Even if it’s not an overt or intentional message, it’s there. Stories have different messages to different people. When people hear a story they automatically begin to process it. Subconsciously, everyone’s perspective has been shaped by the stories they’ve heard. That’s why people tell stories; that is their purpose. They’re a consequence of our need to make sense of what happens the real world, to label people “good” or “bad”, and actions “right” or “wrong”. No author could’ve better conveyed a message about stories in a story than Tim O’Brien with The Things They Carried. Soldiers go to war having heard stories about patriotism and honor and sacrifice. What they find is that the world isn’t a story. They’ve been duped. As O’Brien wrote, “If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue”(O’Brien 68). When Mitchell Sanders says, “There’s a definite moral here”(13) he’s being sarcastic. Things happen in war for no reason. That, O’Brien says, is the only truth to be told in a war story. Anything else is a lie, even if it’s the truth. “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83). To O’Brien, the message is more important than whether or not it actually happened or even could happen, at least in war stories. He is saying that even if something happened in war, if it doesn’t convey the larger truth of what war is like, then it shouldn’t be told. O’brien even intentionally contradicts himself in his stories, to stress the irrelevance of the details and to convey to the readers that they shouldn’t care whether it happened or not. O’Brien describes a man he killed in My Khe, “He liked books. He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night, lying on on his mat, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of stories”(125). Most of the details of O’Brien’s story in the chapter “The Man I Killed”, are obviously fabricated. He invents a story about the young man’s future had his face not been blown off by a grenade. This is to convey, both to himself and to his readers, the depth of what happened. He ended a life. The man’s future, whatever it was, was taken away from him. Later O’Brien writes that the whole story is fictional. Why did he write it if there was no basis in truth? Maybe the truth was less personal. Maybe he killed a man from far away, with a mortar round. Did O’Brien really kill anyone? Perhaps even he doesn’t know. But it doesn’t matter, because the guilt is there. “But this is too true: stories can save us”(225). Telling stories, be it written or to himself, is how O’Brien copes with his memories. It’s how he copes with death and the things he saw and did in Vietnam. He uses his writing to process his memories. After years have passed, the literal details of his memories have blurred, but the emotional content has become much clearer. O’Brien feels guilt, anger, and frustration. Telling it in the form of a story allows a form of detachment, clarifying for himself how he feels. As O’Brien said, “By telling stories, you objectify your experience. Your separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, ... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain”(158). O’Brien’s comrade, Norman Bowker, had no such outlet. He wanted desperately to process his memories by telling someone about them, like O’Brien does with his books. But he couldn’t explain to anyone how he felt, he didn’t know where to begin. So he committed suicide. Linda was a girl O’Brien knew when he was in fourth grade. He loved her, and she died of cancer. It was his first experience with death. He said, “I’m forty-three years old now, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way. ... And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination I can still see her as if through ice, as if I’m gazing into some other world, a place where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are no bodies at all. … Sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights. ... I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story”(245-246). The story of Linda gives the book as a whole more weight. It shows the relevance of the storytelling theme to those of us who never have to deal with extreme circumstances of war. We all have to deal with death. Stories will bring memories back to the present. Stories can bring the dead back to life. At the end of the quote, where O’Brien writes that that he’s saving Timmy’s life with a story, he means he’s not only preserving and revisiting his memories of Linda and the soldiers, but also of his younger self. Stories are very powerful. They bind us together culturally and teach us many of our ethical values. When soldiers venture away from society and into war, the sudden nihilism of the world strikes them hard. And when they return, the conversion from that lawless, meaningless world back to normal can be just as shocking. Stories are what cause men to go to war, and help them cope with it afterwards.

Works Cited:
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.