Thoughts About Neilson's Essay

I think that Jim Neilson’s essay about The Things They Carried was predominantly aimed at explaining how and why Tim O’ Brien wrote the book the way he did. Neilson quotes from Peter S. Prescott in Newsweek saying "Straightforward wars are built like novels. . . . Messy wars, like the one we fought in Vietnam, lend themselves more readily to fragmented narratives." Perhaps this is why O’ Brien decided to write the story as he does. He could not have gone through and written about his experiences from start to finish, point A to point B because there is too much to write about. Not everything is in order in the novel and just like the war itself, nothing seems to be in order either. Chaos and disorder prevails.

Neilson later goes on to say that “it is within this framework—the belief that the war escapes understanding and representation and even makes us liars—that O'Brien attempts to tell a true war story.” I think this is definitely the best insight that I got from Neilson’s essay because it really helped me understand where O’ Brien was coming from when he wrote the stories he did and acknowledged that true war stories don’t have to be fact to still be true.

Neilson does a good job of criticizing O’ Brien and this can especially be seen when he says “the board of directors of Dow Chemical are more blameworthy than people who switched channels at the mention of politics. O'Brien cannot make such seemingly obvious distinctions because, according to the logic of postmodernism, to do so is to endorse a naive and dangerous positivism. And so he is left with an assortment of equally plausible (and equally false) explanations.” I find this to be especially true. O’ Brien could have done a better job of taking stances on some issues that he presents. But instead he writes with great ambiguity; perhaps because the war itself and the other contentious issues of the time were ambiguous. I understand why he does it, but I would have liked to see more firm stances (I’m even ambiguous about his ambiguity). Amazing what postmodernism does, or does not do. But that’s about all for now.