One of the main themes in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is that what truly matters in a story is emotional truth rather than factual truth. This is the same with life. Throughout life one will always experience the same emotions in the exact same ways. A couple will know that same feeling of falling in love from twenty years earlier once their kids have gone off to college and they have time for themselves again. A daughter will know the same guilt and sorrow for staying out past curfew as she did for drawing all over the walls when she was three. There may be a different environment, different facts, different characters, etc., yet the emotions remain unchanged. A person still holds the capacity to feel their own sadness, sorrow, guilt, passion, or joy. A human’s life is like a quilt of emotions, each fabric fused seamlessly together, and is experienced as one continuous piece of emotional thread.
If life is not this way, if there is a clearly defined transition from one stage to the next and a person completely changes with each transition, O’Brien would have no way of recollecting the stories he does in The Things They Carried. It is made clear throughout the novel that these stories may be completely fabricated, yet they help to put across the emotions O’Brien experiences, “But listen. Even that story is made up. / I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth” (O’Brien 179). While facts may detach and float away, emotions become a part of the human; they are engraved inside and cannot be forgotten. In this way, O’Brien can recollect the emotions he experienced twenty years ago in one stage of his life and create a story that effectively expresses them to the reader.
When recollecting a time forty years ago when a child was teased in second grade, they may not recall who was poking fun at them or for what reason, yet they are attached to that experience by their emotions – that hot embarrassment and the force of the tears welling up and pushing behind their eyes. Still knowing that emotion from forty years ago and being able to experience it all over again is proof that one lives their life continuously as the same person. They may change on the outside and how they come across to others, but they will always retain that same inner “essence.”
2 comments:
You write, "When recollecting a time forty years ago when a child was teased in second grade, they may not recall who was poking fun at them or for what reason, yet they are attached to that experience by their emotions –"
Today (Saturday) I listened to an interesting program about movies people considered scary as children. One person recalled a segment in a movie that lasted by a second or two. The experience occurred several years ago but the memory of it remains with the individual. As a result he would not let his child see the movie.
Something that triggers a deep emotional response can have a life long impact. As I write, I think of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." In the story, some people no longer remember the reason for the annual lottery, but the eagerly participate in the event.
I liked how you focused more on the unchanging emotions a person feels in life rather than their unchanging attributes. I did not think of that. Over time, we may feel the same emotion towards different things but the emotion itself does not change. Reflecting on emotions felt in the past can be a way of reflecting on one's inner "essence". I also liked your comparison of life to a quilt! :)nice job!
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