Alternative Truth and Narrative Freedoms in Vietnam War Literature (Abby Hartzell)

The title of my comps was “Alternative Truth and Narrative Freedoms in Vietnam War Literature.” I examine the use of autofictional devices in Tim O’ Brien’s The Things They Carried and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For which allow the narrators to construct a single story from multiple perspectives. 

 

Transcript

I’ll give just a really brief overview of my comps in this video. The first thing I want to talk about is the two books that I chose: 

• The Things They Carried is an interconnected series of short stories written by Tim O’Brien who is a veteran of the Vietnam War. He was a foot soldier in Vietnam and a lot of his personal experiences are embedded into these stories but it’s also a work of fiction so there’s a lot of elements that are from his own imagination. 
• The Gangster We Are All Looking For is a novel written by lê thi diem thúy who is a Vietnamese American refugee. She came to San Diego, CA when she was 9, and like O’Brien, embeds a lot of her personal experience into the novel. The protagonist grew up in the same neighborhood; a lot of the characters are based on people in her own life — but these are not explicit connections that she draws. These are only things that she has talked about in interviews after her book was published. 

I’ll then go on to what is really the heart of my argument which is talking about this blending of truth and fiction. In the overall genre of Vietnam War literature, there is an expectation that authors who have lived through the war and have personal experiences in the war will be “truth-tellers” even if they publish works that are designated as works of fiction. They are held to this expectation that whatever they write is based on their own experiences and is going to be historically-accurate truth. In Vietnam War literature criticism, veteran and refugee authors are considered to be shorthand for “truth tellers.”

One way that authors can respond to this expectation for truth is through blending fiction and autobiography so that they become ambiguous. Nowadays we refer to this as autofiction. In my comps I refer to this blending as autofictional devices. These are very apparent in the narrative voices of both texts. In TTTC the narrator explicitly talks about his combination of autobiographical and fictional experiences. He speaks through his own perspective as well as omnisciently through the perspective of other characters. In The Gangster… it’s not an explicitly autofictional text, it doesn’t comment on the blending of fiction and autobiography but it does have a similar impact of taking the narrative experiences that are similar to the author’s life, but also frequently switches perspectives. Neither narrator is confined by this first person I. 

What I find really fascinating about the autofictional devices and the transitions in narrative perspective is the freedom of what it allows these authors to do. It’s not just to allow authors to challenge expectations for truth telling; it’s really to go beyond that and to convey a deeper, more complex story with more emotional complexity. It creates a network of characters who are all experiencing the same story, but from different viewpoints. Thus, the first-person pronoun, “I,” becomes much more complicated here. It’s not a constrained autobiographical perspective but actually a dynamic that the narrator can play with–going back and forth between the freedom of omniscient perspective and the constraints of first-person.   

• I use a quote from the theorist Susan Lanser: Dramatized narrator engages with “the dynamic of freedom and constraint” to illustrate this idea.

Fiction allows for the ability to go into any character’s mind and autobiography which is the limitation of only seeing through one’s own perspective. 

So my main argument is: 

• While at times these narrators are constrained by first-person perspective to only convey their own thoughts and experiences, at other times they are free to reveal the thoughts and experiences of other characters. In both texts, the “dynamic of freedom and constraint” of autofictional devices allows the narrators to construct a single story from multiple perspectives. 

Although I don’t have time in this presentation to go into the texts themselves, I have many examples in my comps where I dive in and apply these concepts to various chapters and passages, switches in points of view on a single page or between individual perspectives. 

To conclude, I’ll read a quote that I think is really thought-provoking: 

• “Before America became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam, it had to . . . ‘invent’ the country and the political issues at stake there. The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous . . . storytellers” (Kaplan 169). 

So this idea is that the government of the United States had to construct a fictional narrative around clear dichotomies of good vs evil or democracy vs communism to convince people that their war was justified. However, for the individual person, for the foot soldier in Vietnam or for the refugee, that experience is so much more complex and so much deeper. For them it’s not a fictional construction of good vs evil or democracy vs communism but it’s about their emotional experience. One thing that occurs during the war can be experienced by 20 people and remembered very differently. In their transitions between perspectives, these novels are able to construct a much more emotionally complex experience of the war and ultimately contribute to a more nuanced national memory of the Vietnam War. 

By blending autobiography and fiction, and engaging with the dynamic of freedom and constraint, the authors are able to create more complex webs of perspectives and voices and access deeper narrative truths. These emotional truths could not be conveyed through just a timeline of what occurred during the war or a historical/factual account. We need art in order to process historical events in a way that is deeper than just the facts of what happened during the event. These authors are engaged in this process.