University of Zurich

FS 2021
English Department

Mansi Tiwari
Textual Analysis Group 9

The Deconstruction of the ‘War Story’ and Language in Tim

O’Brien’s How to Tell a True War Story

Yanik Trachsler
Steinhaldenstrasse 50
yanik.trachsler@uzh.ch
Tel. 076 559 54 85 June 2021
“Sometimes [a true war story] is just beyond telling” (O’Brien 71). This line in Tim
O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” encapsulates the central notion one is left
with after reading the short story. Yet, to arrive at said notion, it is necessary to grasp
what “beyond telling” means in the context of O’Brien’s story. Here, “telling” refers to
a truthful recounting of transpired events with the focus lying on ‘truthful’. The implied
author of this story struggles for its entirety with the fact that true war stories hover
around and go beyond the limits which allow such a truthful recounting. In this literary
struggle the implied author works out a concept called “real truth”, which he thinks to
be responsible for the inherent disjuncture in “telling” true war stories (O’Brien 85). In
brief, “real truth” can be seen as the combination of subjectively perceived events and,
perhaps more importantly, emotions. The difficulty of processing and communicating
said “real truth” in and through language is the root of the aforementioned issue of
“telling” true war stories. As a result, the implied author questions the relationship of
truth and language in general through his literary struggle. Simply put, if language is
insufficient in expressing the truth that lies in a war story, then what are the
consequential implications for language as the universal system of constructing truth?
This intrinsic discussion of truth and language is situated in a metafictional war story
because war reflects this questioning and breaking of norms and conventions.
Therefore, Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” uncovers the limits of
language, the system used to construct truth, through a metafictional deconstruction of
the war story.
Before the deconstruction of the war story and, through it, language can be
investigated, it is essential to focus on the construction that causally precedes
deconstruction. Therefore, it needs to be established how war stories are constructed,
notably in regards to “How to Tell a True War Story”. War stories or military fiction
works are special in that they are especially prone to become the site of a struggle
between reality and fiction caused by expectations concerning their historicity and their
inherent fictional properties as an entertainment medium (Beaumont 70). This struggle
is further amplified by their spatial and/or temporal proximity to their readers.
Essentially, “writers of fiction are sensitive to the role as moulders of ‘history’” in that
they shape their readers perception of historic events which in turn might lead to
“historical distortion” (Beaumont 69). This circumstance is exactly the reason why truth
carries such weight in the context of war stories and is, therefore, seminal in O’Brien’s
short story. War stories in general are constructed in a space that contains two factors

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that may disrupt the construction of truthful stories. The first factor arises from the
cultural and political importance war carries. While it can be argued that all fiction is
concerned with important cultural and political themes and questions, it is especially
relevant for military fiction because various actors have an interest in instrumentalizing
war fiction to benefit their personal efforts in controlling such a highly contested space
such as war, for example in the form of propaganda (Beaumont 70). The second, and for
this discussion more important, factor arises from the notion that war is a space in
which norms are broken and reconstructed. The implied author puts it this way: “Right
spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law
into anarchy, civility into savagery” (O’Brien 82). In essence, war is a space were the
boundaries between opposite concepts are dissolved. This means that war stories follow
a different set of codes compared to everyday life. However, this is problematic for the
truth construction process because the text, the war story, and the reader of said text
exist in different spaces, following different codes. A circumstance that leads to a
disruption of the truth construction process because it is not one-sided but a the result of
the interaction between the author in the form of a text and the reader. Traditional war
stories mitigate this problem by adjusting their codes to match the reader’s perception in
an attempt to conform to a societal expectation of objectivity; however, this leads to the
creation of a fictional counter-part to war that does not reflect its essence but
reconstructs war to fit the everyday codes of society (Beaumont 71). The untruthful
(re)construction of war through traditional war stories is exactly what the implied author
in “How to Tell a True War Story” rejects.
The tool used by O’Brien to deconstruct untruthful war stories is ‘new
journalism’. It emerged in 60s and 70s in the course of negotiation between historical
and fictional truth (Rance 78). It is an approach to journalism that tries to find a
compromise between the “[scepticism towards] claims to objectivity” and “the defence
of a sense of durable verities” in journalism (Rance 78). The scepticism towards claims
to objectivity was seen as an inherent property of traditional journalism, while the
defence of durable verities evolved from the expectations that journalism is supposed to
reflect reality (Rance 85). This approach to journalism carried various implications for
the literary space, namely genres that have strong ties to historical events such as war
stories. Therefore, it is not surprising that the notion of ‘new journalism’ is apparent in
O’Brien’s short story, as it was written during the dawn of this new approach to history
based texts. The notion of ‘new journalism’ plays a central role in the metafictional

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frame narrative where the implied author tries to isolate what it is that constitutes a true
war story. “All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting,
making up a few things to get at the real truth.” (O’Brien 85). This excerpt encapsulates
the idea of ‘new journalism’ with the part about “adding and subtracting, making up
new things” representing the lack of objectivity and the “real truth” representing the
existence of durable verities. This ambiguous property of true war stories, which is
central to their inherent code, is put at the center of the implied authors argument to
deconstruct traditional war stories. “In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence
your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is
ever absolutely true” (O’Brien 82). The rejection of definite truth in the realm of war
and, in turn, war stories goes against the principle of everyday codes that rely on such a
definite truth. Instead, it embraces the codes of war and war stories, which are
structured by an “overwhelming ambiguity” that produces “real truth” (O’Brien 82).
One example for this ambiguity is the LP story told by Sanders. He constantly assures
the implied author about the truth of his story just to admit the next day that he “had to
make up a few things” (O’Brien 77). However, in the same vein like the implied author,
Sanders makes up things to get to the “real truth”, solidifying the ambiguous
relationship of truth and fiction.
“Real truth” is the goal of a true war story but how is it achieved? The implied
author makes it clear that “real truth” can only be achieved through the interactive
process between a text/speaker and a reader/hearer. According to Silbergleid, there are
two different aspects of truth at play in this process, namely “happening-truth” and
“story-truth” (132). The former constitutes a reality-based and historical understanding
of truth, which tends to be more objective, while the latter constitutes an emotion-based
understanding of truth, which tends to be more subject (Silbergleid 133). To achieve
“real truth” the speaker and hearer have to find a balance between these two
understandings of truth where, both, the events that happened and emotions that were
felt are present. If this process is successful a “provisional comprehension” through
storytelling has been achieved, that is termed the “real truth” (Wesley 7). This notion of
“real truth” as process present throughout O’Brien’s short story. The first example is the
previously mentioned LP story told by Sanders. The interaction between Sanders and
the implied author where Sanders admits to having made up things showcases an
negotiation in which the speaker doubles down on elements that support the emotion-
based story-truth to balance it out with the reality-based happening-truth. However, the

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made up elements and, more importantly, how Sanders revealed them to be made up
were essential for the process of “real truth” because it exemplifies the effect on the
hearer’s (implied author) provisional comprehension. The second example for the
construction process of “real truth” showcases an unsuccessful outcome. When the
implied author talks about his experiences concerning what happens after he tells his
stories he has the following comment for older women telling him to leave the grim war
stories behind: “I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a
war story. It was a love story” (O’Brien 85). Then the implied author comes to the
realization that all he can do start over or, to be more accurate, continue telling his story
to find a balance and get to the real truth. In essence, “real truth” is unstable and the
result of interactive process. This makes “real truth” a difficult process that is amplified
by the fact that the negotiation and construction of “real truth” is limited not only by the
balancing act of “story- and happening-truth” but by another complicated process,
communication through language.
Language is the system or code used to construct truth and make sense of the
world. This is also true in the context of war stories. According to the Saussurean
approach to language, it is a sign system where a sign is made up of a signifier (the
word) and a signified (the object/concept) (Cohan and Shires 10). Furthermore, this sign
system is based on three guiding principles, namely that signs are arbitrary, they work
through convention, and they differ from one another (Cohan and Shires 11). Yet, if one
of these principles is disrupted the meaning-making system starts to crumble. This is the
case in “How to Tell a True War Story” where especially the principle of difference is
disregarded. An example for this can be found in the excerpt “A thing may happen and
be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” (O’Brien 83).
There are four concept that are central to the meaning of this sentence: “happen(ing),
lie, not happen(ing), and true/truth.” If these concepts are analysed from an everyday
perspective, there would be two pairs of opposites, namely “happen” and “not happen”,
as well as “truth” and “lie”. Further, it could be said that “happen” is related to “truth”
trough similarity and to “lie” through difference, while the opposite is the case for “not
happen”. However, in the excerpt these conventional meaning-relations are abandoned
by linking “happen” and “lie”, as well as “not happen” and “truth”. What makes this
violation of a basic language principle interesting is that while inacceptable in the
everyday understanding of language, it is warranted or even necessary in the
communication of war stories because it portrays war’s “overwhelming ambiguity”

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which is necessary to achieve “real truth”. This is exemplified with the following lines:
“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and
adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and
love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man;
war makes you dead” (O’Brien 80). In short, war blurs the difference between different
concepts and as result, errors in communication occur, sometimes referred to as
“slippages” (Hutcheon 119). As result, the ambiguity or even inadequacy of language
in war and war stories can be attributed to the ambiguity of war in and of itself.
Now that both the issues concerning “real truth” in war stories and truth in
language are established one might ask how they are intertwined in O’Brien’s story? A
central scenario that highlights their relation is the absence of talking (language) in
conjunction with a happening that reflects the “overwhelming ambiguity” of war. There
are two major examples of such a scenario. The first one is located in Sander’s LP story
when the soldiers are in the mountains and unable to talk, as in make meaning of the
world through language, the fog starts to take over and with it the ‘unbelievable’ noises
like music and talking party guest can be heard. Even though Sander’s acknowledges
that he made these ‘unbelievable’ noises up, they still belong to the “story-truth” and
were accompanied by an absence of language. The second example is the mutilation of
the VC water buffalo as told by the implied author. It too showcases the absence of
language accompanied by an event as it can only found in war. The two sentences that
encapsulate this scenario are “Nobody said much” and “We had witnessed something
essential, something brand-new and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was
not yet a name for it” (O’Brien 79). Both stories highlight that the absence of language,
which can be seen as more extreme function of language failure, in conjunction with an
event that reflects the ambiguity of war break the codes meaning making. In the second
example, the implied author even acknowledges that war leads to sensations that do not
conform to language, implied by the lack of a name for it. The notion that codes of
objective meaning-making and truth construction are dependent on a stable sphere that
conforms to the conventions inherent to these meaning-making codes is an essential
realization. In a convention-defying sphere, such as war, that complicates or even
disrupts meaning-making, the limits of codes like language are exposed to a much
stronger degree than in everyday life.
In conclusion, Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” uncovers the
limits of language, the system used to construct truth, through a metafictional

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deconstruction of the war story. I established based on what principles traditional war
stories work, namely the adjusting of codes to match the everyday codes of the reader.
Then I showed how O’Brien applied concepts of “new journalism” to his metafictional
deconstruction of the war story in an attempt communicate true war stories through an
everyday understanding without adjusting the codes. Further, I explained how the
process of “real truth” is essential in this communication of true war stories. From
there, I showed how the negotiation of truth is not only relevant for true war stories but
also in language and how “slippages” in language can lead to a miscommunication of
truth. Lastly, I illustrated how issues concerning truth in war stories and language are
negotiated along side each other in O’Brien’ short story. All in all, this essay had the
purpose to bring attention to the fact that for codes to work they depend on spaces that
match the convention inherent to these codes. This means that we as actors in such
spaces need to make sure that we as actors in these spaces do not go beyond the limits
that are marked by the aforementioned conventions. Otherwise, this may lead to the
creation of convention-defying spheres like war in which our codes and, as a result, the
construction of truth seize to exist.

Word count: 1569

Primary Texts:
O’Brien, Tim. “How to Tell a True War Story.” The Things They Carried. New York:
Broadway Books, 1998. 67-85. Print.

Secondary Sources:
Beaumont, Roger A. “Military Fiction and Role: Some Problems and Perspectives.”
Military Affairs, vol. 39, no. 2, 1975, pp. 69-71.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Postmodernism”. The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory,

edited by Simon Malpas and Paul Wake, Routledge, 2006, pp. 115–26.

Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires. “Theorizing Language.” Telling Stories: A

Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988, 1-20.

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Rance, Nick. “’Truly Serpentine’: ’New Journalism’, In Cold Blood and the Vietnam
War.” Sage Journals, vol. 11, no. 2, 2002, pp. 78-100.

Silbergleid, Robin. “Making Tings Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical

Metafiction.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, 2009, pp. 129-55.

Wesley, Marilyn. “Truth and Fiction in Tim O’Brien’s ‘If I Die in the Combat Zone’
and ‘The Things They Carried’.” College Literature, vol. 29, no. 2, 2002, pp. 1-
18.