Final+Exam+Review


 * EAST HARTFORD ADULT EDUCATION **  ** Contemporary Literature Final Review **

1. In three to five sentences explain how the following quotes reflects metafiction in the novel: a. “I want to tell her exactly what happened, or what I remember happening... This is why I keep writing war stories” (//Ambush//, p125) b. “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, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (//Notes//, p152). c. “But it’s not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I wan to tell you about why this book is written as it is… I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (//Good Form//, p171). d. “In a way, maybe, I’d gone under the Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d mostly worked my way out” (//Field Trip//, p178) e. “But this is true: stories can save us… But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world… 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 combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (//The Lives of the Dead//, pp 212, 218).

2. Answer the following questions in three to five sentences for each response: a. What role does truth play in metafiction? b. Does Tim O’Brien present an accurate portrayal of the Vietnam War in his novel? c. How does “Good Form” and “Field Trip” reveal the author’s purpose for using metafiction in the novel? d. “The Lives of the Dead” is from Tim O'Brien's autobiographical fiction about the war in Vietnam as a reverie of memory, dream, and story that resurrects the dead. The dead are fellow soldiers, the enemy dead, and a first love who died in childhood. Why would O’Brien want to resurrect the dead? e. In his Big Think interview, Tim O’Brien says that //The Things They Carried// “is just not a book about war, you idiot. It’s a book about love and a book about storytelling. But you also feel overwhelmed by the knowledge that you’re not going to get through, that the literal-minded are going to remain literal-minded.” What does Tim O’Brien say about his novel and about the people who read it wrong (literally)?