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By definition, an unreliable narrator is a narrator whose credibility cannot be taken at face value. Such is the case with the narrator Tim O’Brien in the text The Things They Carried, where O’Brien explicitly admits to “...[adding] and [subtracting], making up a few things to get at the real truth” (81), thereby raising basic suspicions about the factual validity of the text. Although unreliable, nevertheless, O’Brien’s narration comes off as plausible to the reader, due to his self-awareness of unreliability.
The unreliable narrator builds his credibility by calling attention to the false assumption that his actions in the text mimic real life events; that he reflects the factual events that happened in the author’s life.
The author-O’Brien creates the narrator-O’Brien as a figure who shares similar autobiographical qualities with him: both figures are war veterans who were accepted into Harvard graduate school (39), and both have published novels entitled Going After Cacciato (151) and If I Die in a Combat Zone (152).
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“ Thank you so much for accepting my assignment the night before it was due. I look forward to working with you moving forward ”
Perhaps most obviously, the two share the same name. These assigned credentials allude to the fallacy of reading the text as an autobiography, as these shared elements appear to ground the fiction in the physical world of the reader.
Autobiographies, by definition, are retellings of factual events, traditionally judged on their veracity; specifically, authorial intent that garners narrative credibility – the matter in question for such texts becomes the certainty of the author’s ethos. Ethos in this context is determined by authorial intent; if the reader does indeed experience the fictional text through the lens of an autobiography, then the attributed authorial intent is merely a projection of verisimilitude.
In this sense, the O’Brien-narrator establishes authorial credibility through the credentials assigned to him, and the subsequent lens in which the text may be initially read.
The argument can be made that the narrator does not start speaking from the first event of the Vietnam War narrative, but instead from is typically deemed the paratextual information. The book title is awarded a page of its own before the body of the text, followed by the disclaimer, “A work of fiction by Tim O’Brien.” Immediately succeeding this disclaimer is the book’s dedication. Dedications generally are presented in the author’s voice, bestowed to certain members whose lives intersect with the author’s in the physical world that the author inhabits. However, The Things They Carried is “…lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.” Keeping in mind that the text is presented as work of fiction from the title page, the textual suggestion appears to indicate after the disclaimer, anything and everything, can be fictionalized. Therefore, this dedication can be read as the narrator’s voice and not the author’s – the members of Alpha Company do not have to exist in the same reality of the author’s and the actual reader’s, but instead, in the narrator-O’Brien’s reality.
By subverting the expectation of having the author’s voice in the dedication by allowing the narrator-O’Brien to dedicate the text, the structural pragmatics contributes to the ease of reading The Things They Carried as autobiographical. Such a reading allows the reader to move the characters, from Jimmy Cross to Kiowa, out of the textual reality and into the reader’s physical world. Such a shift of characters from the textual reality to the physical reality is characteristic of autobiographical textual reading. Once again, reading the text through an autobiographical lens assigns credibility to the narrator by the nature of the assumed authorial intent in ethos, a central concept in autobiographies.
In the same lines, O’Brien-the-narrator begins the Vietnam War narrative with the listing of the things the men in Alpha Company carried. “Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water” (2). The lists measure out concrete objects, articles that have substance and meaning in the reality of the actual reader’s world. Importantly, there is no conveyed emotional story or opinion attached to any of these objects – they are presented as is, merely items.
At this point in the text, the average reader has no reason to question the unreliability of the narrator beyond the reality that this is a fictional story, and the presentation of these tangible objects serves as a structure, offering a visualization of the objects and their weight. Later, these definite items transition into the intangible – emotions such as “...a kind of dignity” (18) or “…a wistful resignation” (19), but the initial presentation of material stuffs plays off of the natural human belief in present objects. “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present” (172), O’Brien later states, but belief comes by easier if one can believe in things one can see, or in this case, conjure up a mental representation. Belief shares many qualities with trust, and trust is placed in what readers deem credible. Often, in today’s time, it is science, and the precise manner that O’Brien dictates these objects and their weighted measurements, “…a Claymore antipersonnel mine – 3.5 pounds with its firing device” (7), plays into the modern certainty that scientific facts do not lie. Therefore, the O’Brien’s conscious choice to create structural lists of what the men in Alpha Company carry is a tactic to ascribe credibility to his narration.
“How to Tell a True War Story” begins with the tripartite speech act. “This is true,” (64), O’Brien-the-narrator declares, before delving into the story of Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon. Within this locutionary pronouncement, the declarative, illocutionary act of this statement works as a substantiation that the statement is in fact true; as a result, the perlocutionary act is the belief of the statement’s truth. Although the need to establish the truth of this particular story insinuates there are certain parts of the text preceding the statement that are not wholly true, the presence of this statement establishes the truth of the story that will follow. However, O’Brien warns in the same story that “In many cases a true war story cannot be believed” (68).
With such contrasting statements, one is inclined to question the paradox of the issue. The Things They Carried reads like a true war story, and therefore “cannot be believed,” but O’Brien has previously declared “This is true,” implying that the information and events in “How to tell a War Story” is true. In an attempt to resolve this dissonance, the chapter “Good Form” follows. This chapter reads like an aside more than a chapter where the collection of events making up the Vietnam War narrative is developed. In a sense, this two-page chapter reads like O’Brien laying the rules down for the truth and fact of his story. “It’s time to be blunt,” he opens. “I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented.” This last sentence is partially what explicitly characterizes the narrator as unreliable – he creates stories rather than adhering to the factual events that occurred in Vietnam, and this is where the need for the distinction of “story-truth” (171) and “happening-truth” (171) come into place.
Story-truth is roughly equivalent to the emotional truth of the Vietnam experience; it is inclusive to what emotional aspects occur to the narrator-O’Brien. The purpose of story-truth is to relate the emotional experience of Vietnam in the best manner possible, even if the best way is not observing the typical “good form” of war stories. This purpose of story-truth can be summed up as a way to evoke empathy; a method for the reader to vicariously experience the sensations that the narrator felt – “I want you to feel what I felt” (171).
For example, O’Brien presents the happening truth on page 171 of the text: “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.” The presentation of facts is something that the reader may understand as head knowledge, rather than visceral knowledge. In clichéd terms, the presence of death makes the narrator assume culpability, whether or not he participated in the taking of life. However, story-truth presents a different view of this sense of guilt. “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” (172). In this, the reader’s imagination conjures up the likeness of a dead body, mutilated by the effects of war, and the sense of accountability that O’Brien attempts to convey is solidified by the admission that O’Brien killed the young man. It does not matter, factually, whether O’Brien killed the man or not, but the reader assigns the narrator’s emotions to his action of killing the man, which intensifies this sense of guilt.
A good war story, American culture tells us – and it is a reasonable assumption to assume that the implied reader is an American, as the author-O’Brien is an American man writing from the perspective of an American soldier, in an American country – is, like autobiography, judged on its veracity and its abidance to the facts that occur. These factual events, in The Things They Carried, are deemed “happening-truth,” or what events occur to the character-O’Brien.
Elements such as discrepant dates detract from the veracity that readers lend the traditional “good form” text; story-truth strays from this notion. The presence of story-truth intimates that the facts of the war is not the only “truth” and that an equal importance should be weighted to the emotional experience that the story-truth attempts to convey.
Narrative credibility is established through the narrator’s cognizance of his unreliability, particularly with the elements of story-truth and happening truth. The presentation of two truths affixes the tag of unreliable to the narrator, because the occurrence of two truths is viewed as mutually exclusive. Therefore, one of narrator-O’Brien’s truths must be a lie. However, O’Brien subsequently explains the presence and the necessity of both truths; while this does not negate the unreliable tag, it does create a space for the reader to lend the narrator plausibility.
With regards to ethicality, the death of Norman Bowker in “Notes” is paramount. Bowker writes in a letter to O’Brien, “What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole...Something about the field that night. The way Kiowa just disappeared into the crud. You were there — you can tell it” (151).
Upon Bowker’s suggestion, narrator-O’Brien reveals that he did, in fact, create a version of the night in the shitfield — not the version published in The Things They Carried, but an idealized version that took “pride in a shadowy, idealized recollection of its virtues” (153), published in the novel Going After Cacciato. Bowker’s reaction was “short and somewhat bitter. ‘It's not terrible,' he wrote [O’Brien], ‘but you left out Vietnam. Where's Kiowa? Where's the shit?’” Eight months later, the reader learns that Bowker hung himself in the locker room of the YMCA.
O’Brien’s rewrite of the story in The Things They Carried allows the reader to infer that he carries, if not all, some of the weight of responsibility for Bowker’s suicide. The implication is that there are consequences to telling a story incorrectly, and a storyteller (in this text, the narrator) bears the ethical weight of ensuring a story is best presented. In short, the story-truth must be made present, along with the happening-truth. Regardless if O’Brien’s facts were accurate in Going After Cacciato, the attribution of virtue to the actions in the shitfield misrepresents the story-truth, and therefore the storyteller – the narrator O’Brien in that novel – failed in his responsibility to narrate the story correctly. The misrepresentation of that night, consequently, became and element contributing to Bowker’s suicide, and perhaps as an act of redemption or catharsis, O’Brien has rewritten the story. After all, O’Brien admits that storytelling is “Partly catharsis, partly communication” (151). It does not matter whether the story of Norman Bowker’s suicide is factual, or not, what is important is that the consequences of misrepresented storytelling come off as true to the reader.
“Notes,” is narrated as more of a warning against flippant storytelling and storytelling that erroneously glorifies experiences than a continuation of the Vietnam War plot, presenting the concept of storytelling as something with ethical implications and repercussions. The narrator at this point as established his unreliability through the presentation of dual truths, but he reaffirms his credibility by acknowledging this responsibility. The demonstration of his experience with misrepresenting story-truth in storytelling and his experience with the consequences of this plays with the physical world’s attribution of ethos to experience. Experience leads to trust, and for trust to be given, credibility must be observed in the trustee.
By that sense, the narrator-O’Brien’s credibility is reaffirmed through his experience. Even as the reader comes to terms with the knowledge that the narrator-O’Brien is unreliable, one finishes the text with a sense that unreliability does not equate to a lack of credibility. Both the structuring of the text, such as in lists and letters; and the self-consciousness of this narrator’s unreliability allow the reader to project his or her own verisimilitude upon the text the narrator. Fact and truth become separate, but they are both part of the reality of the Vietnam War narrative, and both components of this reality hold equal import. Ultimately, though classically unreliable, the narrator proves to his audience that his words are credible — perhaps not in the traditional manner of factual happening-truth, but instead, in story-truth and the importance of empathy.
Establishing Credibility through an Unreliable Narrator. (2022, Jan 24). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/establishing-credibility-through-an-unreliable-narrator-essay
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