You Dream It As You Tell It

Photo of Tim O'Brien from the Jacket of his first book, If I Die In A Combat Zone

On October 20, I will hear Tim O'Brien speak at our university.  This semester, the incoming freshmen are participating in the Common Reading Experience (CRE) by reading O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried.  With America again again at war, his novel has a relevancy not missed by the young people in my classes.

 

Tim O'Brien as a young soldier in Vietnam

While rereading The Things They Carried, I've been stuck most of all by what O'Brien says about storytelling as an act of survival. 

For instance, at the end of the chapter, "Spin," O'Brien writes:  "Stories are for joining the past to the future.  Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.  Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story." 

Stories not only join the past and future, O'Brien tells us, but they can also represent an opportunity to make right.  In his chapter, "On The Rainy River," he (through his narrator) reveals that the function of the story is to thank a man named Elroy Berdahl:  "this story represents a small gesture of gratitude twenty years overdue."  It is as though this gesture of gratitude is necessary to the survival of O'Brien's narrator, and by extension, O'Brien's own survival.

I believe the most powerful evocation of the purpose of stories, of their ability to help the teller "survive" occurs in the final pages of the novel when O'Brien writes, "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combineto make spirits in the head.  There is the illusion of aliveness." 

O'Brien tells us here that within our stories, the dead can live again through us--we can restore something of the past for ourselves and we can create a vision of the past for our readers.  Yet the primary function for O'Brien of his storytelling seems to be his narrator's (and his own) survival, for he writes:  "I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming [about the past]."  In these dreams, which become his stories, O'Brien recognizes that he'll "never die." 

Of particular note is the fact that the character, Norman Bowker, commits suicide after he returns home from Vietnam.  O'Brien suggests this act is partly due to his inability to tell his own story of what happened to him in the war.  In a letter, Bowker begs Tim to write Bowker's story:  "I'd write it myself except I can't ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can't figure out what exactly to say. ... You were there--you can tell it." 

O'Brien then reflects:  "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 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.  You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, ... and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain."

Tobias Wolff once wrote in his magnificent memoir, This Boy's Life, that the man can give no help to the boy.  Yet, using skating as a metaphor, O'Brien explains how telling his story now can give help to the child (Timmy) he once was and to the man (Tim) he will be in the future. 

He writes, "I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and 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." 

James W. Loewen writes in his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, that the purpose of the study of history is not simply to discover "what happened," but to restore to the past all its overlooked possibilities. 

Storytelling, as O'Brien shows us, can do the same thing.