The Things We Carry, Vol. 1

Today in class, Mr. Heidkamp mentioned that this year, we'd be discussing the levels of "truth" in every story we read...  Other than The Things They Carried.  Why?  Because there are so many levels of truth in this book that the conversation would both a) last for several days, considering we only have 48 minutes to a day in class, and b) still skip over many of the truths, simply because thinking of and exploring them all is a near impossibility.  I agree--I myself would never be able to find all the levels, and even with the ones I do know of I could talk for hours.  And at this point in my train of thought, I said to myself, "Heck, I could even write several blog posts about this sort of--wait a sec..."  So, here I am.  And today, I'll start with what hit me most recently--O'Brien's method of coping with his loss of Kiowa after his failure to save him.

Yes, I hear you, loyal readers.  "But Norman Bowker was the one who let Kiowa die!"  To be honest, I'm surprised people asked me about this.  At the end of "Notes", O'Brien defines to us that it was, in fact, he who let Kiowa die (or, rather, couldn't save Kiowa). He doesn't say much about it, but it's certainly said.

"In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa.  Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night.  He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor.  That part of the story is my own." p.154

O'Brien coped with Kiowa's death and his own personal self-perceived failure of his friend by talking about it in a story.  After all, that's practically what the whole book is, right?  O'Brien says it himself in that same chapter--this process of moving past the impact of a war became easier for him once he started writing such things down.  It's his way of reconciling everything that happened.  Well, what he does with this Kiowa-Norman Bowker bit is a really just a classic form of saying something you can't say otherwise.  But first, let's look into just why O'Brien can't say it.

Look at "Speaking of Courage" from a perspective of "Norman Bowker" dealing with what happened in the shit field.  Bowker can hardly handle it.  He acts cool about it, but everything he talks about someone circles back to what happened in that shit field.  It's a story he's dying to tell, but for one reason or another, he can't do it.  The only one he can tell is an imaginary version of his father, and even that left out a fair share of details.  And this makes sense--when one fails to save someone they care about, the emotional consequences are dire to say the least.  He had to say it, but he couldn't say the real truth to anyone who might actually react or judge him.

However, in "Notes", O'Brien adds another layer of coping mechanism to the function.  Many of us have heard someone use an excuse for coming out with something that goes something like the following: "Yeah, so I have this friend... And this friend I have, who is not me, has this problem or this thing that he/she needs to get past."  And, toward the end of it, they may or may not reveal that, shocker, the person with the aforementioned problem was them all along.  O'Brien does something similar.  He uses his own experience as Norman Bowker's, allowing him to assume a third-person perspective and really describe just how hard it was to deal with what happened.  And, at the end of it all, he reveals that it was not Norman Bowker at all.  The town in question was his own hometown, and the story Norman told had actually been his own all along.

Shocker, right?