The Truth In Things..

I thought we were coming to an end with the whole postmodernism idea but I guess I was wrong.. Anyways.. I think the gist of the article The Truth In Things by Jim Neilson would be that "The Things They Carried accords with much of the anti-totalizing strains of postmodernism, and [Neilson] will argue that it is precisely this tendency in his fiction that makes it incapable of opposing the ongoing reconstruction of the war as an American tragedy." It seems like O'Brien is trying to capture the essence of the similarities of the Vietnam war and the postmodern war. The "normal" American people are thought of to understand things better. Possibly like the elite discorse? According to Neilson, "O'Brien's concern is the attempt to reconcile fact and fiction, the real and imagined."

Neilson criticized the work by stating that "The weakness of The Things They Carried is that O'Brien's imagination is virtually the only reality. O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes an consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese. In doing so, O'Brien has constructed a test that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." I somewhat agree with this. I think O'Brien could have given us deeper understanding to make his book more effective and real.

"To many critics an theorists, the war cannot be represented adequately through traditional literary modes; only a postmodern aesthetic can convery something of the war's surreal, sense-shattering, media-inflected nature."

After I thought about Neilsons statement "for American literary culture the Vietnam War seems at times to have been waged more against totality that against the peoples of Indochina", I started to understand and agree with this statement. I believe that there indeed were more deaths of souls than there were lives.