At the end of the section, "Speaking of Courage", O'Brien finally addresses the nature of his novel. He acknowledges the odd structure of metafiction, the intermingling of fact with fiction. O'Brien writes, "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others."Thank you Tim. Now this whole jumping off point for writing makes much more sense-- because for me the problem lay in how was I, as the reader, intended to come away from this book with an enriched understanding of the trauma of the Vietnam War if I was unsure of what was fact and what was fiction. The purpose is that this piece of literature was not for me. It was for the author and those traumatized.
I find it interesting and perhaps a motive of the author's use of metafiction that the Vietnam War was something akin to metafiction. Is this real, or is it unreal? What did people perceive the war as and what was it actually? Perhaps, this is just the nature of war which is why fact and fiction had to be meshed by O'Brien.
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