15. Untruthful Truths

The section "Good Form" at first really confused me. But as I've sat here and thought about it for awhile, I think I kind of get where O'Brien is coming from. "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why the story-truth is truer than the happening-truth," (171). I was not sure how that was true at all at first. But then I read, "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again," (172). In the beginning I was very frustrated with O'Brien for telling a story and then in the next section saying it was not true. I never got the point until now. The facts themselves are not true. But the feeling and the emotion behind it could not be truer. It is the only way O'Brien can begin to explain what war is like. You have to make it comprehensible for your audience, because they will never fully understand the guilt and the pain and the heartbreak. He isn't just making up war stories for the heck of it. He is just explaining his feelings in a way that we can understand. By describing to us the appearance of his "first kill" with the star shaped hole in the young boy's head, we are able to better understand why O'Brien is so scarred by it. If he said that he killed many people but could not describe their face, we would not think as much of it. But to O'Brien, the guilt and the sorrow he felt was equal to that of the made up experience he wrote with the description of the boy's dead body. This book is meant to be felt, not just read word for word. The words don't make this book true, rather it is the feeling and emotion and experience behind it.