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Imagining the truth: Narrative structure and technique in the works of Tim O'Brien
Abstract
In Tim O'Brien's six major works of fiction and non-fiction--If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, Going After Cacciato, The Nuclear Age, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods--the organizational structure of the books, the growing role of O'Brien himself as the storyteller/narrator/writer character in these books, and O'Brien's common literary techniques have all become an integral part of the meaning of these narratives. In If I Die in a Combat Zone and Northern Light, O'Brien's arrangement of the chapters is simple, but deliberate enough to indicate that he is concerned with form as well as meaning. The narrators of these books are easily identified and tell their stories directly and simply. With Going After Cacciato and The Nuclear Age, O'Brien's arrangement of the chapters is also deliberate, but now these structures have grown more complex, explicit, and purposeful; they are now integrated with, and directly relate to, the books' content. O'Brien begins to experiment, choosing not to use a single narrator, but instead to employ multiple narrators who operate within the bounds of new, postmodern narrative forms. In his two most recent books, The Things They Carried and In the Lake of the Woods, O'Brien's role as the storyteller, writer, and arranger of his text becomes central to his art. The books are as much about O'Brien himself, how he constructs his texts, and how he works to comprehend his own psychological reality, as much as they are about his characters' splintered past and tortured present. An understanding of the books' structures and their multiple levels of narration becomes crucial for the reader, since the manner in which O'Brien presents the chapters of his prose is as equally important as the content of the prose itself. There are several narrators in these books, some who are anonymous, and some who embody aspects of Tim O'Brien, the author, himself.
Subject Area
American literature|Rhetoric|Composition
Recommended Citation
Radelich, Michael A, "Imagining the truth: Narrative structure and technique in the works of Tim O'Brien" (1998). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9903782.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9903782