There were a lot of times in The Things They Carried that O’Brien got very candid and “meta” with the reader. The three most prominent examples of this in my mind were the three vignettes towards the end, “Notes” “In the Field” and “Good Form,” in which O’Brien used to connect the situation of Kiowa’s death and the storytelling of that account.
In “Notes” O’Brien makes use of sources. In this section he opens up that in part the reason he included Norman Bowker’s explicit narrative because he asked him to and he shares this aside as a reference to the way that stories have to feel authentic in what they say and what they are trying to do. He goes on in this way by saying “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 nonetheless help to clarify and explain.” In this way he discusses how even though there are some things that he omitted and revised from the truth, but in turn it made the story authentic for the sake of fluidity and the points being made.
The next section is “In the Field” in which O’Brien showcases the points of view and the indirect characterization of many characters and their importance in showing how a situation can be changed, ever so slightly, by how those different people reacted and changed because of it. This all is in part due to O’Brien’s decision to put this section in third person. Instead of just getting Cross or Azar or the other soldier, you get pieces of all three. This lets O’Brien link the different themes associated with death, Cross’s guilt and questioning of his own leadership, Azar’s transformation of becoming more mature and in a way, the unnamed soldiers lack of association to the dead and his ulterior motives for finding Kiowa. I thought this section was important so that the reader gets to see the whole company. So much of war is focused on the brotherhood aspect of things and I like how in this way O’Brien was able to showcase the different points of understanding that can be seen from each of the company members rather than just focusing on a singular protagonist.
While brief in length, “Good Form” is necessary for O’Brien’s discussion as the form of writing as invention and what those inventions mean in terms of audience. He says that “stories…make things present. [He] can look at things [he] never looked at. [He] can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. [He] can be brave. [He] can make [himself] feel again.” O’Brien points out, very eloquently the difference between happening-truth and story-truth. Story-truth as he puts allowed him to make sense of the situation for his own good so that he could reach a sense of catharsis about killing a man. Rather than just giving us a flat and faceless memory, we are given something dynamic and it allows us as an audience to connect to the invention O’Brien as a narrator has given to us.
In these three sections O’Brien gives us something that in a linear story, would have been completely lost from the experience. In putting the story in a series of vignettes he has allowed himself to show and iterate themes and asides that would have been lost by just giving it to the reader straight up.