Tim Obrien

5 Pages 1234 Words

Tim O’Brien
“…The literal truth is ultimately, to me, irrelevant. What matters to me is the heart-truth. I’m going to die, you’re all going to die; the earth is going to flame out when the sun goes. We all know the facts. The truth – I mean, does it matter what the real Hamlet was like, or the real Ulysses – does it matter? Well, I don’t think so. In the fundamental human way, the ways we think about in our dream-lives, and our moral lives, and our spiritual lives, what matters is what happens in our hearts. A good lie, if nobly told, for good reason, seems to me preferable to a very boring and pedestrian truth, which can lie, too.”
-Tim O’Brien 1999
Tim O’Brien manipulates the reader’s customary understanding Tim by giving the narrator of “The Things They Carried” his own name and many of his own biographical details (date of birth, military record, and so on) while simultaneously stressing, throughout the narrative, that all the characters (including the narrator) are fictional and all the stories (including those in which the narrator takes part) are invented. It could be said that, in “The Things They Carried”, everything is true but nothing is authentic (Wharton).
O’Brien’s readers have experienced immense difficulty when trying to get to grips with the slippery nature of the so called “authenticity” (or in fact the inauthenticity”) of O’Brien’s writing. Of all the devices used to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction, the books narrator seems to present the most difficulties for the reader. To understand O’Brien’s writing, it seems to be essential to make a clear distinction between Tim O’Brien the fictitious narrator (“The I-narrator) and Tim O’Brien the real, living author (“Tim O’Brien” or “O’Brien”).
Tim O’Brien is an author still living and writing. He was born in 1946, in a small town in Minnesota (Gale Group, 1999). After graduating...