Joining the Past to the Future: The Autobiographical Self in

The Things They Carried

Ann M. Genzale

Philosophy and Literature, Volume 40, Number 2, October 2016, pp. 495-510
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2016.0033

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/649409

Access provided by Mount Royal College (17 Jul 2018 16:51 GMT)
 Symposium: Self-Identity

Ann M. Genzale

JOINING THE PAST TO THE FUTURE: THE

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SELF IN THE THINGS THEY
CARRIED

Abstract. This paper seeks to highlight the critical role of affect in the
construction of narrative by raising parallels between Tim O’Brien’s
metafictional renderings of memory, imagination, and storytelling in
The Things They Carried and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s models of
human cognition. Literary narrative has long been associated with the
ability to communicate emotional experiences, and recent developments
in neuroscience have shown that emotions and affect are tied not only
to basic functions of life management but also higher-order cognitive
processes. Taken together, O’Brien and Damasio’s work demonstrates
how narrative facilitates cultural learning and is therefore essential to
survival and well-being.

D evelopments in neuroscience over the last few decades have

shown an increasing interest in examining art and culture as a
means of acquiring a greater understanding of the human brain. By the
same token, our knowledge of the brain can be tremendously helpful in

Philosophy and Literature, 2016, 40: 495–510. © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press.
496 Philosophy and Literature

the study of cultural output, not only in terms of how culture works in a
biological sense but why it remains so indispensable and integral to the
well-being of individuals and societies. In Self Comes to Mind, neurosci-
entist Antonio Damasio describes the development of culture as a form
of homeostasis that regulates our social environments and engages the
very same neurological mechanisms that manage our internal bodily
environments. These mechanisms are also thought to produce the
beginnings of human consciousness, a dynamic process that involves
an unconscious organization of thoughts, memories, and images into
narratives. Cognitive and affective approaches to culture, and literary
narratives in particular, then, can deepen our understanding of certain
brain functions such as memory and the perception of internal and
external stimuli, including other minds. Such an approach can also
shed light on the role of storytelling in the formation of consciousness.
Damasio’s framework for a human consciousness that is self-aware
and capable of aesthetic expression emerges out of the bond between
brain and body and begins with the basic, primordial feelings that
originate in the upper brain stem and make up what he calls the
protoself. These primordial feelings, accompanied by interactions with
the body’s internal milieu and its external environs, constitute the core
self, a form of sentience that humans share with many other mammals.
Our distinctly human ability to map these interactions, in the form of
images and memories and our unconscious inclination to sort these
images and memories into a coherent pattern, produce what Damasio
refers to as the autobiographical self, which he describes as these narrative
patterns, or autobiographies, “made conscious. They draw on the entire
compass of our memorized history, recent as well as remote. The social
experiences of which we were a part, or wish we were, are included in
that history, and so are the memories that describe the most refined
among our emotional experiences, namely, those that might qualify as
spiritual.”1 Art and literature can also be seen as outward expressions
of this autobiographical self, as they too represent a conscious ordering
of ideas, memories, and images.
What makes Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried a particularly rel-
evant literary work to study from a cognitive perspective is its unique
narrative form. Composed of a linked collection of short stories and
self-consciously described as a work of fiction, it nonetheless contains
stylistic elements typically associated with memoir, such as its dedication
to the ostensibly fictional members of Alpha Company and O’Brien’s
use of his own name as the novel’s narrator/protagonist. There are also
 Ann M. Genzale 497

several instances of metanarrative interwoven among the stories, which

serve to even further trouble the distinction between fiction and mem-
oir and allow O’Brien to comment directly on the art and purpose of
storytelling. Following his nonfictional account of his experience during
the Vietnam War, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,
with a work of fiction written in a similar fashion more than a decade
later, it is evident that in The Things They Carried, O’Brien is comment-
ing specifically on the efficacy of fictional narrative in the generation of
affective responses. O’Brien’s combination of generic elements of fiction
and semiautobiographical nonfiction, as Maria Bonn cogently argues,
“is not solely aesthetic postmodern gamesmanship but a form that is a
thematic continuation of the author’s concern throughout his career with
the power and capability of story.”2 Together, the stories in The Things
They Carried, like Damasio’s work, show the ways in which narrative is
essential to the formation of a sense of selfhood while emphasizing the
critical role of affect in artistic expression and other forms of cognition.
Historically, neuroscientists have been hesitant to treat affect and
emotions as topics of study in themselves, deeming them too complex,
too personal, and too ephemeral in nature to provide clear insights into
the workings of the human brain. Instead, much of the initial focus was
placed on higher-order cognitive functions. However, research by neu-
roscientists, including Joseph LeDoux, Damasio, and most notably Jaak
Panksepp, has shown that affect not only ensures survival by maintaining
the body’s internal environment and triggering appropriate behavioral
responses to external stimuli but also activates these so-called “higher”
cognitive processes and has greater influence over cognition than previ-
ously believed—in fact, in many cases, affect makes cognition possible. As
LeDoux points out, “the brain systems that generate emotional behaviors
are highly conserved through many levels of evolutionary history” in most
animals, but in humans, these shared primary process brain systems are
also the source of conscious feeling-states such as happiness, sadness,
and anxiety.3 Therefore, it is crucial for any study seeking to analyze the
effects of a literary work from a cognitive perspective to consider the
interaction between primary-process emotional systems and cognition.

II
The study of literature is especially suited to help us understand these
emotional systems and the ways in which they contribute to the formation
of social bonds. As Patrick Colm Hogan puts it, emotion “is, after all,
498 Philosophy and Literature

the primary stuff of literature.”4 Interdisciplinary work encompassing a

variety of fields including psychology, evolutionary studies, philosophy
of mind, literary studies, and neuroscience have yielded affective and
cognitive approaches that stress the importance, as well as the biological
advantage, of being able to express emotion and relate to the emotions
of others through narrative. According to Hogan, narrative provides
“instructions for the simulation of emotionally consequential experiences
that, when successful, produce emphatic emotional responses in read-
ers” (Hogan, p. 38). This act of identifying and interpreting thoughts
and emotions is known as one’s theory of mind, and some have suggested
that the reader of a literary work is practicing a kind of mind-reading
technique that is both pleasurable and useful in developing a capacity
for empathy, a trait that allows us to establish intrapersonal relationships
as well as larger social groups and communities.
In “Storyworlds and Groups,” for instance, Alan Palmer presents the
idea of a “socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition,” which
he calls “intermental” thought: “Just as in real life, where much of our
thinking is done in groups, a good deal of fictional thinking is done by
large organizations, small groups, families, couples, friends, and other
intermental units.”5 Intermental thought is one characteristic of what
Palmer refers to as the storyworld, which readers can access through
their understanding of the physical setting, social norms, and fictional
minds of individual characters. “Novel-reading,” he writes, “is mind
reading. Fiction can only be understood in this way” (“SG,” p. 182).
Lisa Zunshine also explores the ways in which our cognitive architecture
facilitates and even encourages the process of mind reading in everyday
social interactions as well as in literature. Specifically, she proposes that
the reason we expect to interpret descriptions of characters’ body lan-
guage as cues to their thoughts and feelings stems not only from our
past experiences as readers but rather because the ability to make these
interpretations is built into the human brain. “Successful” mind read-
ing, from a purely cognitive standpoint, is to recognize certain actions,
like a particular facial expression or an outburst of tears, as indicative
of some emotional state. While it is still possible to misinterpret actions
and body language—in everyday life and in literature—Zunshine notes
that cognitive psychologists have found that by “parsing the world and
narrowing the scope of relevant interpretations of a given phenomenon,
our cognitive adaptations enable us to contemplate an infinitely rich
array of interpretations within that scope.”6 In other words, we come
up with a range of possibilities almost unconsciously, and use context
 Ann M. Genzale 499

and other information to make a sophisticated “choice” as to which is

the most likely.
By way of example, Zunshine provides a cognitive analysis of Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a literary text that many readers find particularly
taxing. She hypothesizes that because multiple levels of intentional-
ity exist in Woolf’s prose, the work places considerable demand on
readers’ mind-reading abilities. The reason, she writes, is that “the
cognitive adaptations that underwrite the attribution of states of mind
likely differ in functionally important ways from the adaptations that
underwrite reasoning that does not involve such an attribution,” such
as a lengthy series of causal events (“TM,” p. 205). Perhaps most tell-
ing is Zunshine’s quotation from Woolf’s diary about her experience of
writing Mrs. Dalloway: “Woolf wanted to increase the pace of her explo-
rations, to be able to ‘embody, at last,’ as she would write several years
later, ‘the exact shapes my brain holds’ (Diary 4:53)” (“TM,” p. 212).
Woolf’s attempts to convey her sense of the interconnectedness of her
characters’ minds as they interact with one another and reflect on their
respective circumstances result in a rich, multilayered narrative that is
as much about the wonders of the mind as it is about the events that
occur in the story itself.
The Things They Carried, while stylistically very different from Mrs.
Dalloway, also explores the nature of the mind, constructing for the
reader the collective, intermental thoughts of the men of Alpha
Company. In the opening story, for instance, O’Brien lists the supplies
and keepsakes that they carry along with “all the emotional baggage of
men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles,
but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had
tangible weight.”7 The cataloging of these different forms of “baggage” is
not an exercise in cognition for cognition’s sake—rather, this story, and
the novel as a whole, engages the readers’ cognitive abilities in order to
convey felt emotional experiences of the Vietnam War.
Marilyn Wesley identifies the same effort to engage with the reader
in If I Die in a Combat Zone, particularly in passages where O’Brien
shifts into second-person narration when describing physical sensations
and emotions. However, she notes that this earlier work is reliant on
“the standard of the representation of truth,” while The Things They
Carried, “by abandoning literary realism, comes closer to presenting a
polemic vision that insists on the problematic nature of the Vietnam
experience.”8 This aligns O’Brien’s novel with what Linda Hutcheon
has called historiographic metafiction, which interrogates the nature
500 Philosophy and Literature

of representation itself and “works toward a critical return to history

and politics through—not despite—metafictional self-consciousness and
parodic intertextuality.”9 While both works seek to establish social bonds
between author and audience, without the formalistic constraints of
the war memoir, O’Brien’s use of fictional narrative alongside auto-
biographical metafiction in The Things They Carried allows him to not
just share his own emotional experience but also encourages a critical
engagement with the Vietnam War that is made all the more compel-
ling by its attention to affect.

III
Scientific evidence is growing for the notion that literature and other
forms of narrative are capable of generating potent emotional responses.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Andrea McCool, Hanna Damasio, and
Antonio Damasio, in their preliminary study “Neural Correlates of
Admiration and Compassion,” used narratives based on true stories
to evoke the social emotions of admiration and compassion in their
subjects, and monitored their brain activity using functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI). Using a combination of written, verbal, and
visual images, they were able to induce the desired emotional states in
the participants, and proved their hypothesis that “the experience of all
4 emotions engaged brain regions involved in interoceptive represen-
tation and homeostatic regulation, including anterior insula, anterior
cingulate, hypothalamus, and mesencephalon,” as well as convergence-
divergence regions called posteromedial cortices (PMCs), which, as the
authors point out, are also involved in self-related processes.10 What their
findings suggest, then, is not only that narrative is capable of triggering
“real” emotion but that social emotions, which we might call higher-order
or secondary emotions, engage with the same neural mechanisms as
primary-process affects, which are involved in maintaining homeostasis
within the body and provide the foundation for the self as we know it.
Therefore, affect is a critical component in the construction of human
consciousness, and can be accessed through a variety of narrative forms.
In Self Comes to Mind, Damasio hypothesizes that consciousness is “a
self process within an awake mind” that is constructed in distinct parts
of the brain and linked together by a series of coordinating mechanisms
(SCM, p. 180). He posits several areas of the brain that could play a role
in this coordination process, including the thalamus and its associative
nuclei, as well as convergence-divergence regions, especially the PMCs,
 Ann M. Genzale 501

which, as we have seen, become engaged when we experience social

emotions and the bodily feelings that accompany them. It is important
to note that these coordinating mechanisms sort images according to
the order in which they are generated as well as their value to the life
regulation process. This is what allows the brain to keep the pulses of
core self in a constantly changing but nonetheless coherent pattern.
Damasio describes this process as a series of “cinemalike editing choices
that our pervasive system of biological value has promoted” (SCM, p. 72).
Therefore, acts of memory and perception are colored by their benefit
to the organism. The autobiographical self, then, not only includes these
conscious memories, thoughts, and feelings but also their embodied
physical sensations and affects, and is thereby linked to the biological
processes needed for survival.
The following passage from O’Brien’s “The Lives of the Dead,” the
last story in The Things They Carried, functions almost as a snapshot of
the narrator’s autobiographical self. While looking at photos of himself
as a child, the narrator reflects on the essential aspects of himself that
have not changed: “I’m not fooled by the baggy pants or the crew cut
or the happy smile—I know my own eyes—and there is no doubt that
the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am now. Inside the body,
or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging. The
human life is all one thing . . . a little kid, a twenty-three year-old infantry
sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow” (TTC, p. 223).
In other words, O’Brien establishes a sense of continuity between the
past Timmy and the present Tim. His entire life history is contained in
one body, in one mind, and in one story. Like Damasio, he develops an
idea of the self as a process, containing a lifetime’s worth of thoughts,
feelings, and memories. Interestingly, the narrator locates the self as
also possibly existing beyond the body, suggesting selfhood in a more
metaphysical sense, as well as being inside the body, which in the work
of Damasio and other neuroscientists is where the self as we know it
begins—with the bond between brain and body that generates primor-
dial feelings and helps to carry out the functions of life regulation and
makes up the protoself.

IV
The brain’s constant mapping of its surroundings both inside and
outside the body produce what Damasio refers to as images, which con-
sist not only of an object’s physical attributes but also “their spatial and
502 Philosophy and Literature

temporal relationships, as well as their actions” (SCM, p. 70). Some of

these image-maps are used unconsciously, allowing the brain to perform
sophisticated functions of life management, while others are experienced
consciously during interactions with external stimuli. Mapping does not
only occur in a particular moment of interaction but also during recall,
and both types of maps can often occur simultaneously. According to
Damasio’s model, the brain does not store collections of images as dis-
crete memories. Rather, he proposes a neural architecture for memory
that consists of convergence-divergence zones that store patterns of activ-
ity of neurons in different regions of the brain, and triggers the same
pattern as the original map during recall. This requires what Damasio
refers to as time-locked retroactivation, that is, activating “the components
of a map roughly within the same time interval, so that what occurred
simultaneously (or nearly so) in perception could be reinstated simul-
taneously (or nearly so) in recall” (SCM, pp. 141–42). The mechanisms
that enable this kind of retroactivation occur in the brain’s dispositional
spaces, which are located in both cortical and subcortical regions, and
are responsible for a variety of bodily actions, as well as the creation of
some images. For Damasio, then, the mind is a process, “a subtle, flow-
ing combination of actual images and recalled images, in ever-changing
proportions” (SCM, p. 70).
In “Spin,” O’Brien sketches out a framework of the writer’s mind
that is, metaphorically speaking, quite similar to Damasio’s. O’Brien
writes: “You take your material where you find it, which is in your life,
at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into
a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then
pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off
down a thousand different streets” (TTC, p. 33). This combination of
memory and imagination is a recurring theme throughout O’Brien’s
work, and, for his narrator in The Things They Carried, the act of writing
is also an act of remembering, which he describes as a felt experience
that seems to fit exactly with Damasio’s model: “I sit at this typewriter
and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep
muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree,
and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of
rehappening” (TTC, p. 31, my emphasis). While O’Brien goes on to say
that the “bad stuff” never seems to stop happening, not everything is
that way, even during a war (TTC, p. 31). Damasio, too, cites memory
as a key component in human consciousness, and one of the mind’s
greatest gifts. “Memory,” Damasio writes, “is responsible for ceaselessly
 Ann M. Genzale 503

placing the self in an evanescent here and now, between a thoroughly

lived past and an anticipated future, perpetually buffeted between the
spent yesterdays and the tomorrows that are nothing but possibilities”
(SCM, p. 297). Damasio’s comments echo O’Brien’s work as a writer and
storyteller who creates a work of art that connects the evanescent here
and now with the past, as well as the infinite possibilities of the future.
As Robin Blyn points out, this loop-like structure of memory in The
Things They Carried “prevents the neat closure and false redemption of
the traditional war story.”11 In If I Die in a Combat Zone, O’Brien wonders
“how writers such as Hemingway and Pyle could write so accurately and
movingly about war without also writing about the rightness of their wars.
. . . The men in war novels and stories and reportage seem to come off
the typewriter as men resigned to bullets and brawn.”12 Perhaps in part
because of the literary tradition of the war story with which his book
would inevitably be compared, the idea of the war story itself becomes
as much of a topic in The Things They Carried as the war itself. In “How
to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien’s description of a traumatic moment
in which a member of Alpha Company is killed by a booby trap sets
up a contrast between what he calls happening-truth and seeming-truth.
“What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told
that way,” he writes. “The angles of vision are skewed. . . . The pictures
get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go
to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes
the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact
truth as it seemed” (TTC, pp. 67–68).
O’Brien’s distinction between happening-truth and seeming-truth, as
well as his interrogation of the concept of truth throughout the novel,
as Robin Silbergleid points out, urges readers “to question truth more
generally, particularly as it relates to the representation of Vietnam. The
narratives and experiences of the Vietnam War, like the postmodern
condition, are uncertain, ambiguous, multiple.”13 In other words, partly
because of the emotional, nonlinear nature of memory itself, particularly
when it comes to remembering trauma, O’Brien encourages readers to
be skeptical of claims to an absolute, unchanging truth, especially when
it comes to the Vietnam War. As he provocatively writes, in a true war
story, “nothing is ever absolutely true” (TTC, p. 78).
The Things They Carried, then, is more concerned with the seeming-
truth experienced by Tim O’Brien the narrator as opposed to the strictly
factual truths of Tim O’Brien the author. The use of his name and other
biographical details, as well as his metafictional commentary throughout
504 Philosophy and Literature

the novel, nonetheless lead the reader to wonder how much, if any, of
O’Brien’s book is factually true. The answer to this question matters,
according to O’Brien, and he goes on to challenge the notion that the
factually true stories move us the most. “You’d feel cheated if it never
happened,” he writes. “Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit
of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue.
. . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a
total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth”
(TTC, pp. 79–80). A true war story, according to O’Brien, “makes the
stomach believe” (TTC, p. 74); that is, the story has been successfully
told if the reader or listener feels something, and it is the responsibility
of the teller to keep telling it, “adding and subtracting, making up a
few things to get at the real truth” (TTC, p. 81).
What makes this remark so crucial is that O’Brien is not simply stat-
ing that stories can be used to establish emotional connections but
that telling a fictional story is a particularly effective way to do so. He
concludes by saying that a true war story is never actually about war;
rather, it’s about “the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when
you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and
do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about
sorrow” (TTC, p. 81). This is why O’Brien notes that people who attend
his readings and tell him that he should write something besides war
stories haven’t truly listened. “It wasn’t a war story,” he writes. “It was
a love story” (TTC, p. 81). Here, he challenges his audiences to think
about war stories not only in terms of setting but also to think of them
as affective maps of the effects war has on the soldiers who fight it, as
well as the social bonds that can develop under these conditions.

V
In “The Man I Killed” and “Ambush,” O’Brien illustrates the many
ways of telling a war story by presenting the same event—the narrator’s
killing of a Viet Cong soldier—in two different narrative styles. “The Man
I Killed” focuses on the narrator’s thoughts in the immediate aftermath.
His initial reaction—rather than self-conscious reflection on questions of
guilt and responsibility, or even relief at being alive—is to create a story
about the person whose life he has just ended. “He liked books,” O’Brien
writes. “He wanted someday to be a teacher of mathematics. At night,
lying on his mat, he could not picture himself doing the brave things his
father had done, or his uncles, or the heroes of the stories. He hoped
 Ann M. Genzale 505

in his heart he would never be tested. He hoped the Americans would

go away” (TTC, p. 119). By creating a story for him, both O’Brien the
narrator/protagonist and O’Brien the author make the life of the young
Viet Cong soldier real and present, for themselves and for the reader,
regardless of whether the story is an accurate, factual description of his
life to that point. By endowing him with a past, hopes, and desires for
the future, O’Brien is able to resist dehumanizing the Viet Cong soldier.
This dehumanization is demonstrated throughout the novel by Azar,
who is eager to play cruel pranks and makes insensitive remarks about
the violence that surrounds them. “You scrambled his sorry self, look
at that, you did,” he tells the narrator, “you laid him out like Shredded
Fuckin’ Wheat” (TTC, p. 119). By constructing a narrative for the Viet
Cong soldier, O’Brien’s narrator avoids this type of engagement with
the war and remains connected to his own sense of humanity.
“Ambush” is a much shorter account of the events in “The Man I
Killed,” written from a distance of several years and providing more
details of the narrator’s decision to actually throw the grenade know-
ing that the Viet Cong solider would die as a result. The tone is more
reminiscent of memoir than “The Man I Killed,” and the reader’s sym-
pathies are focused more directly on the narrator, who is still trying to
come to terms with his actions. However, a few stories later, in “Good
Form,” O’Brien writes, “It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old,
true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang
Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented.” It’s
not unexpected that many readers, especially those expecting a straight-
forward war narrative, might experience a degree of frustration at this
point, but O’Brien insists, “it’s not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now,
as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I want to tell you about why the
book is written as it is” (TTC, p. 171).
He refers back to “Ambush” and “The Man I Killed,” explaining that
the events in these stories represent the “story-truth,” and he claims that
the happening-truth is that he was a soldier, and that there were “many
bodies, real bodies with real faces,” and that he is left now with “faceless
responsibility and faceless grief” (TTC, p. 172). It becomes apparent that
this is the emotional truth he had been trying to convey all along, and
he goes on to comment specifically on what the stories accomplish for
him. Like memories, stories have the ability to “make things present. I
can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love
and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (TTC,
p. 172). In Damasio’s terms, O’Brien is creating images that cause him
506 Philosophy and Literature

to reexperience particular emotions, transforming them into a work

of art that invites the reader to experience these same emotions and
acquire a kind of cultural knowledge of the feelings of fighting a war.
O’Brien also engages with, and, at certain points, actually constructs an
autobiographical self, a process of emotions, memories, thoughts, and
fictive possibilities that constitute awareness and identity.

VI
“Notes,” like “Good Form,” is a metafictional account of writing The
Things They Carried, and reads as a behind-the-scenes look at the story
that precedes it, “Speaking of Courage.” It makes explicit references
to the life of Tim O’Brien the author—his hometown of Worthington,
Minnesota; his transition from being a soldier to a graduate student at
Harvard; and his previous war novel, Going After Cacciato. In “Notes,”
O’Brien writes that he had originally written “Speaking of Courage” as a
chapter for his previous novel, but later decided to publish it separately
as a short story using the protagonist’s real name, Norman Bowker,
rather than Paul Berlin, the name of the main character in Going After
Cacciato. He also claims that he had been asked to write the story that
Bowker himself had been unable to tell, a story about how he and his
men set up camp along the Song Tra Bong River in a field that was
essentially the village toilet, and how the rains that night caused Kiowa
to be swallowed up by the field, a tragedy that also cost Bowker the Silver
Star for valor. Here, O’Brien contemplates the reasons why his writing
since his return from Vietnam has been primarily focused on the war:

Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the

throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing
people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me. . . .
I did not look on my work as therapy and still don’t. Yet when I received
Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led
me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended up in
paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience.
You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up
others. (TTC, pp. 151–52)

O’Brien goes on to say that the story’s “emotional core came directly
from Norman Bowker’s letter: the simple need to talk,” and much of the
story consists of hypothetical conversations—which Bowker was not able
 Ann M. Genzale 507

to have with his father and his former girlfriend, Sally, who had since
gotten married—that O’Brien meticulously constructs (TTC, p. 152).
They are so precise, in fact, that O’Brien even imagines Sally’s disgust
at Bowker’s description of the field in Vietnam as a shit field: “If she
were here with him, in the car, she would’ve said ‘Stop it. I don’t like
that word.’. . . Clearly, he thought, this was not a story for Sally Kramer.
She was Sally Gustafson now” (TTC, p. 139). The imagined conversation
between Bowker and his father is similarly detailed, with Bowker’s father
expressing support and reminding him of the seven medals he did win,
and Bowker imagining “the feel of his tongue against the truth” (TTC,
p. 136). In reality, however, Bowker becomes so desperate to speak
to someone that he almost tells all to a complete stranger through a
drive-thru intercom, but decides against it. In “Notes,” O’Brien reveals
that Norman Bowker eventually takes his own life, never having told
his story to anyone.
However, there are moments in “Notes” that remind the reader, ulti-
mately, that the stories of The Things They Carried are works of fiction.
For example, O’Brien writes, “You start sometimes with an incident that
truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward
by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless
help to clarify and explain” (TTC, p. 152). O’Brien then ends the story
with a disorienting disclaimer: “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” (TTC, p. 154). The ambiguous language of this
last sentence could suggest that this part of the story is O’Brien’s own
invention, or that it is he who actually experienced a failure of nerve
and/or lost the Silver Star for valor. In either case, the story suggests
that fictional narrative is a particularly effective way to communicate
traumatic events and difficult truths, and in some cases, could be the
difference between life and death.
In “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien puts forth his most direct case
for the need for stories and storytelling. “But this too is true,” he writes,
“stories can save us” (TTC, p. 213). In this particular story, the narrator
connects his first experience with death—his childhood sweetheart who
succumbs to an inoperable brain tumor—to the experience of being at
war and being constantly surrounded by death. He draws a comparison
between his habit of dreaming Linda alive, and eventually keeping her
alive in a story, to the coarse language and jokes made by the other
508 Philosophy and Literature

members of Alpha Company as an attempt to distance themselves from

the harsh reality of death. “By slighting death, by acting, we pretended
it was not the terrible thing it was,” he writes. “By our language, which
was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste”
(TTC, pp. 224–25). O’Brien’s narrator, however, tries to avoid participat-
ing in this, and does not follow suit when his companions approach an
enemy corpse and take turns shaking its hand. Kiowa notices, and tells
him, “You did a good thing today. . . . That shaking hands crap, it isn’t
decent” (TTC, p. 215). They try to keep lost comrades and friends alive
with stories, in much the same way that O’Brien does with Linda. He
describes the process as a “kind of self-hypnosis. Partly willpower, partly
faith, which is how stories arrive” (TTC, p. 231).
It becomes evident here how O’Brien’s so-called “war stories” are
in fact love stories, and become ways of remembering and honoring
the dead, while saving the living from losing themselves to grief and
despair. O’Brien ends the story, and the book itself, with a note on the
redemptive potential of stories:

And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still
see her as if through ice, as if I’m gazing into some other world, a place
where there are no brain tumors and no funeral homes, where there are
no bodies at all. I can see Kiowa too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon,
and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow
floodlights. I’m young and happy. I’ll never die. . . . when I take a high
leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim
trying to save Timmy’s life with a story. (TTC, pp. 232–33)

As Catherine Calloway points out, through his exploration of imagi-

nation and memory here and throughout the novel and his use of “so
many layers of technique in one work, O’Brien delves into the origins
of fictional creation.”14 That is, O’Brien attempts to locate the impulses
for creating fiction, which in The Things They Carried include social loss,
grief, war trauma, and love, reminding his audience of the power of
the fictional narrative to enable us to relate to these emotions and to
understand them as part of the human experience.
Damasio also proposes that stories can fulfill this need, claiming that
as consciousness evolved and humans began to discover “the drama of
human existence and of its possible compensations” (SCM, p. 291)—that
is, something that could only occur in beings with an autobiographical
or reflective self—cultural developments such as political and economic
systems, laws, religions, and other customs emerged. Damasio explicitly
 Ann M. Genzale 509

links these cultural developments to the same homeostatic impulses

responsible for regulating the body and managing the life process, using
the term sociocultural homeostasis to describe these attempts to maintain
balanced social environments. Damasio adds that the arts, and storytell-
ing in particular, are integral components of this regulation process: “The
problem of how to make all this wisdom understandable, transmissible,
persuasive, enforceable—in a word, how to make it stick—was faced, and
a solution found,” he writes. “Storytelling was the solution—storytelling
is something our brains do, naturally and implicitly. Implicit storytelling
has created our selves, and it should be no surprise that it pervades the
entire fabric of human societies and cultures” (SCM, p. 293). In other
words, Damasio advances the idea that storytelling, in addition to being
a natural process that helps to create individual self-awareness, also
contributes to broader cultural developments through the distinctly
human ability to access and reflect on past memories and emotions, as
well as the ability to imagine potential futures.
As we have seen, these acts of remembering, reflection, and cognition
engage the same neurological mechanisms as primary-process affects,
suggesting that affect and emotion not only help to fulfill basic biologi-
cal needs but also serve as the foundation of what we have come to
understand as the self. To approach literary studies as, at least in part, a
study of manifestations of affective states can therefore provide further
insight into the physical and psychological impact of these states, as
well as their significance in the development of human consciousness.
Literary works such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, in which
the complex relationships between memory, imagination, and storytell-
ing are as much its subject as the Vietnam War, invite such a reading
while challenging its audience to reconsider commonly held assumptions
about truth telling and fictional storytelling.
By combining the rhetorical strategies of memoir and autobiographi-
cal metafiction with the creative possibilities of fictional narrative, The
Things They Carried calls for a deeper appreciation of the need to tell,
read, and listen to stories as a means of sharing emotional experiences
and developing a sense of empathy. O’Brien’s use of metafiction in this
novel, besides calling into question claims to absolute truth in represen-
tations of the Vietnam War, also suggests that fictional storytelling, with
its capacity to generate affective states, can contribute to one’s sense
of self-awareness and can potentially serve as a means of rewriting or
sorting traumatic memories into the fabric of one’s autobiographical
life narrative.

SUNY College at Old Westbury

510 Philosophy and Literature

A previous version of this paper was presented at the 26th annual conference of the Society for
Literature, Science, and the Arts in September 2012. The author wishes to thank her copanelists from
Binghamton University and conference attendees for their helpful comments and conversation. The
author is also grateful to Leslie Heywood for her thorough and supportive feedback on earlier drafts.
1.  Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York:
Random House, 2010), p. 210; hereafter abbreviated SCM.
2.  Maria Bonn, “Can Stories Save Us? Tim O’Brien and the Efficacy of the Text,”
Critique 36, no. 1 (1994): 13.
3.  Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 17.
4.  Patrick Colm Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2011), p. 12; hereafter abbreviated Hogan.
5.  Alan Palmer, “Storyworlds and Groups,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies,
ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 176–92 (184);
hereafter abbreviated “SG.”
6.  Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Experimental Representations of Fictional
Consciousness” in Zunshine, Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, pp. 193–213 (199);
hereafter abbreviated “TM.”
7.  Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (1990; repr., Boston: Mariner Books, 2009), p. 20;
hereafter abbreviated TTC.
8.  Marilyn Wesley, “Truth and Fiction in If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They
Carried,” College Literature 29, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 2.
9.  Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989; repr., London: Routledge,
2002), p. 58.
10.  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang et al., “Neural Correlates of Admiration and
Compassion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
106, no. 19 (2009): 8021.
11.  Robin Blyn, “O’Brien’s The Things They Carried,” The Explicator 61, no. 3 (2003): 191.
12.  Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1975; repr.,
New York: Broadway Books, 1999), p. 93.
13.  Robin Silbergleid, “Making Things Present; Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical
Metafiction,” Contemporary Literature 50, no. 1 (2009): 148.
14.  Catherine Calloway, “‘How to Tell a True War Story’: Metafiction in The Things They
Carried,” Critique 98, no. 1 (1995): 251.