"Unraveling the Deeper Meaning": Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

Abstract

-T _im O'Brien is obsessed with telling true war story. Truth, O'Brien's fiction about the Vietnam experience suggests, lies not in realistic depictions or definitive accounts. As O'Brien argues, [a]bsolute occurrence is irrelevant because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth (Things 89). Committed to examining the relationship between the concrete and the imagined, O'Brien dismantles binaristic notions of happening-truth and story-truth: thing may happen and be total lie; another thing may not happen and be than the truth (89). In order to assess whether he has written fiction that is truer than the truth, O'Brien singles out the type of reaction his stories should provoke: It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe (84). This emphasis on the body's visceral response to fiction aptly encapsulates O'Brien's investigation of the literal and metaphoric relationships between stories and bodies, particularly as such affiliations are forged by psychology of exile and displacement. For O'Brien, the returning veteran's paradoxical desires-a yearning to reverse the unwilling transformations conjured by combat experience; the inexplicable sense of exile that troubles any possibility of an easy return or rest-are best expressed by how true war story never seems to end (83) but can only be told and retold, different each time yet no less faithful to the truths it must convey. O'Brien's compulsion to revisit his war experience through fiction is not unique. The moral ambiguity and unresolved conflicts char