Making Things Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical Metafiction

Beginning with its front matter, Tim O’Brien’s collection of interlinked short narratives The Things They Carried (1990) raises fundamental questions about the nature of truth and narrative authority. Published as a “work of fiction,” the book includes a fairly standard disclaimer that “[e]xcept for a few details regarding the author’s own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.” Yet the book is also “lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company”—a statement that elevates these imaginary characters to the level of real people worthy of a dedication. Such slippery negotiation of fact and fiction continues with the epigraph, taken from John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary, which reads, “[t]hose who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest.” Thus even as the copyright page provides a legalistic disclaimer specifying that The Things They Carried is a work of imaginative literature rather than a historical document, the front matter encourages “inexperienced” readers to appreciate the text as a “statement of actual things,” as a work of “truth.”

If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the use of fiction in order to write history, O’Brien’s narrator also makes liberal use of history (his story) to develop and organize the fiction. Indeed, despite the collection’s self-consciously fictional status, O’Brien incorporates undeniably autobiographical elements, such as a character named Tim O’Brien who is a writer and a Vietnam vet, a writer, like O’Brien himself, who went to graduate school at Harvard and then published a novel entitled Going After Cacciato and a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone.¹ In this way, the book calls attention to its apparent basis in reality, reasserting what many readers take to be the central premise, or promise, of mimetic representation, that life will be mirrored in the book. However, this mimetic gesture inevitably frustrates newcomers to O’Brien’s work, for as soon as the narrator declares something to be true, he invariably confesses he made it up, putting history itself in question. Arguably, it is precisely this liminal space—between fiction and nonfiction—that allows the text to do its critical work.

The declaring and undoing of “truth,” as set up in the book’s front matter, rather than the “truthfulness” of O’Brien’s tale, serves as the central impetus of this essay.² In other words, I am not interested in whether O’Brien tells the truth—an inexorably frustrating and unanswerable question—but rather why the narrator needs to declare the truthfulness of events or details in order for the book to do its work as a narrative account of Vietnam. This performative gesture—the staging of truth through its very utterance—begins in the creation of a protagonist-narrator who bears the author’s own name. Characterized here as “autobiographical metafiction,” this technique is also adopted by many of O’Brien’s contemporaries—including Carole Maso (The Art Lover), John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire), Paul Auster (City of Glass), Mark Leyner (Et Tu, Babe), and Kathy Acker (Portrait of an Eye)—who for diverse reasons and to different ends make use of characters who “are” themselves.³ Consequently, while The Things They Carried is most frequently discussed as a work of Vietnam literature, in this essay I want to resituate the book in relation to another group of contemporary narratives, as part of a larger conversation about what I take to be an emergent postmodern genre situated at the boundary between autobiography and metafiction.⁴ Such classification calls attention to the questions of literary mode raised formally as well as thematically in the text. If, as Fredric Jameson suggests (145), genres operate pragmatically as intellectual “scaffolding” to be put in place to support a particular analysis and then disassembled, my reading of The Things They Carried benefits from delineating a generic category that highlights the use of autobiography...