Tim O’Brien’s problematic truth: traumatic experience through storytelling in “How to tell a true war story”
A major theme common to war fiction is the truthful representation of a traumatic episode. This paper examines Tim O’Brien’s use of experimental techniques in “How to tell a true war story” to highlight the troublesome postmodern connection between fiction and truth, and their close interrelation wi...
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| Format: | article |
| Status: | Published version |
| Publication Date: | 2010 |
| Country: | España |
| Institution: | Universidad de Sevilla (US) |
| Repository: | idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:idus.us.es:11441/31845 |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/11441/31845 |
| Access Level: | Open access |
| Keyword: | War Trauma Story Working through Truth Postmodernism Vietnam Tim O’Brien Guerra Relato Reelaborar Postmodernismo |
| Summary: | A major theme common to war fiction is the truthful representation of a traumatic episode. This paper examines Tim O’Brien’s use of experimental techniques in “How to tell a true war story” to highlight the troublesome postmodern connection between fiction and truth, and their close interrelation with some significant motifs; namely, the nature of storytelling, the rejection of generalizations about the war, and the deconstruction of the concept of truth. Contemporary issues in trauma theory draw on the pathological crisis of truth experienced by survivors, which lead them to both a denial of the experience and an urge to reconstruct it and fill in the gaps of their memory. In O’Brien’s short story the narrator’s compulsive behaviour to tell repeatedly the same traumatic event in different versions is understood as manifestation of his post-traumatic stress syndrome. The therapeutic working-through process he tries to undergo by means of his narrative is undertaken but never successfully accomplished because neither war nor postmodernist aesthetics allow for definite answers or absolute definitions of war. |
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