Josephine: In The Things They Carried, I do want to talk about the structure and also the placement of you, not you but the fictional you. But a world we could have lived in, should have lived in. And so, fiction is a, opens a door to a world that's not the world that we've literally lived in all, all cases. I probably should have walked away from that war but didn't. And fiction could also be about in some cases what should have happened. I mean, I could have walked away from the Vietnam War and gone to Canada. Or you can write about what could have happened. Well, why don't we just tell the literal truth about everything? Why does anybody make anything up? In fiction you can write about what almost happened but didn't happen. Tim O'Brien: It allows you to get at a kind of truth that- that nonfiction doesn't or sometimes doesn't. Josephine: So you're saying that fiction allows you to tell a truth that nonfiction doesn't. And invent a whole- whole bunch of stuff but it's an effort to get at you know, certain emotional or spiritual truths that you just, I can't get at by recitation of fact. It has to do in the- in the end with why I write fiction. That's a- probably as close as I can get to explaining the difference between the two. That horrible squeeze that- that I felt on my psyche or my soul. But it would have little to do with what was happening inside me the summer I was drafted. And I could describe the golf course and that would be true. I could tell you about my pars and my bogeys and it'd all be- it'd all be true. The literal truth would be to say I played golf. And yet, although the story is largely invented, it feels to me truer in a way than the literal truth that I could recount about that terrible summer I was drafted. The characters that are up on the Rainy River don't exist. In fact, I've never been there in my life. I did not get in my car and drive to the Rainy River although I was drafted. Spends six days on the Rainy River, which separates Minnesota from Canada trying to decide should I cross that river and go to Canada or should I go to the war. And it's a story of a fellow who bears my name, Tim O'Brien who gets drafted and heads for the Canadian border. So for- as in one example, there's a chapter in The Things They Carried called On the Rainy River. And there are other times in life when you begin exaggerating and revving up the facts, maybe adding a little bit here, subtracting a bit there, as a way of trying to get at an emotional or spiritual or psychological truth. Tim O'Brien: There are times in life when an event occurs and you go to tell about it, and you're utterly and absolutely factual in your effort to recount what occurred, but when you've finished it feels as if somehow part of the truth is missing even though the facts are there. In fact, the narrator of the book differentiates between the "story-truth" and "the happening truth." When I spoke with Tim O'Brien, I began by asking him about this distinction. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien plays with facts to get at truths. A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried depicts the men of the fictional Alpha Company, including a character named Tim O'Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. The Things They Carried is a work of fiction presented as a memoir. Although Vietnam and its aftermath continued to be his subject, Tim O'Brien turned from non-fiction to fiction, winning the National Book Award in 1979 for Going After Cacciato, a novel about a soldier in Vietnam who attempts to walk from southeast Asia to Paris. In 1973, O'Brien published his memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone. When he returned home, after a stint in graduate school, Tim O'Brien became a reporter for the Washington Post. Although he opposed the war, he reported for military service, and in February of the following, he was sent to Vietnam. In 1968, Tim O'Brien was drafted into the Army at age 21. Welcome to Art works the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how art works, I'm your host, Josephine Reed. Josephine Reed: That was writer Tim O'Brien talking about his 1990 novel, and Big Read selection The Things They Carried. But and, you know, as I say each of these things it's a little bit like pulling a strand out of a piece of cloth, that in the end it's a book about all those things and the, the human heart as well. In part it's a book about re-imagining events and revisiting events thirty years or more after they've occurred. Tim O'Brien: The Things They Carried is in part a book about the Vietnam War, and in part it's a book about the power of stories in our lives.
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