"Notes"

O’Brien reveals to the reader that “Speaking of Courage” was written at the request of Norman Bowker who, three years after the story was written, hanged himself in the YMCA. O’Brien received a seventeen-page, handwritten letter from Bowker saying that he couldn’t find a meaningful use for his life after the war. He had been left behind in Nam and felt very lost. He worked several short-lived jobs and lived with his parents. “Notes” is written in first person, which makes it the story closest to O’Brien’s perspective. O’Brien focuses on the guilt that he feels not over Kiowa’s death but over his own attempts to represent it inauthentically.

While “Speaking of Courage” introduces the postwar Norman Bowker and illustrates how the guilt he feels in regard to Kiowa’s death that follows him home to Iowa, “Notes” is O’Brien’s perspective on Bowker,  in which includes the information of Bowker killing himself less than ten years after the war.

In many ways, this story is a complement to “Speaking of Courage” as well as a sequel. The information provided in Bowker’s letter allows us to understand how seriously he was affected by the war.

Bowker’s actions in “Speaking of Courage”—driving repeatedly around the lake, trying to strike up a conversation with the cashier at the A&W, wading in the lake with his clothes on—may seem perplexing, but the added information we gain from O’Brien’s telling of the story illuminates why he acts as he does.

O’Brien makes the boundaries between truth and fiction vague in order to suggest that telling a true war story is not dependent on any supportable facts.