Metafiction


 * Metafiction in The Things They Carried ** (Houston Teacher’s Institute)

According to William Gass, metafiction is “somehow about fiction itself” (Currie 24). Because “Tim O’Brien” is both a character in the book and the narrator, The Things They Carried can be considered metafiction, and it is therefore important to explain to students, prior to beginning the book, what metafiction is, and why authors use this technique. In an interview, O’Brien states that he uses metafiction to make the stories “more real” (Sawyer 117-126), and the use of metafiction does make the events and stories as real as possible for the reader.

In addition to this aspect of added realism, using “Tim O’Brien” as a character/narrator also helps establish one of the book’s central themes: the differences between “story-truth” and “happening-truth,” and how “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth” (O’Brien 179).

Because the nature of truth is central to many of the stories, and because the narrator at times tells the reader that a particular event is, in fact, not true even as he tells it, students must understand that Tim O’Brien, the author, Vietnam veteran, and father, is not the character in the book, and the voice in these stories is not that of Tim O’Brien, the person. A good way to help students avoid confusion on this issue is to have them look at the book’s title page, which includes the line “a work of fiction” below the title. As many of my students are inexperienced both with reading and with books themselves, this becomes a quick and illuminating way to examine the text itself and remind students that fiction, however closely based on actual events, is not truth.

Of the twenty-two stories that comprise The Things They Carried, seven of them use metafictional elements to varying degrees. “Notes,” “Good Form,” “Field Trip,” and “The Lives of the Dead,” are almost exclusively metafictional, and are some of the most powerful stories in the book. When reading these, it is important that the students understand that the use of metafiction allows the author a degree of intimacy with the reader not found in more traditional third-person narratives. In these stories and in “The Man I Killed,” the layers between author and narrator are stripped away and then mixed together in such a way that the traditional barrier between reader and narrator is virtually non-existent. By removing this barrier, “Notes” and “Good Form” read like personal letters to the reader from the narrator; letters about guilt and complicity, how the difference between right and wrong is blurred during war, and about the nature of truth itself. The effect is both emotionally powerful and unique, and it is therefore necessary to discuss these metafictional aspects as they arise while reading the book. A good question for the teacher to pose to the class is, “ How would these stories be different without the metafictional elements?”