Story-truth

Truth is a hard term to define. According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, truth is “sincerity in action, character, and utterance.” Yet how can one know what is sincere? Truth has to be a relative term then, where each individual has his own beliefs about what is true. In both the novels The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King the reader has to discover what the truth is. Both books rely on the truth of stories to reveal each author’s truth about life.

The Things They Carried is a series of stories that teach the reader the truth about war. One of the characters, Rat Kiley, was a medic who, after spending nights out on watch, would “stare at guys who were still okay, the alive guys, and…start to picture how they’d look dead” (222). For the sake of his troop, he ends up bravely shooting himself in the foot to go home. His story shows the reader the hard things soldiers went through, especially doctors. Another character in the book named Tim O’Brien gets his draft notice and has to make the decision of whether to go to Vietnam or flee to Canada. He ends up on a boat yards from the Canadian border and “All [he] could do was cry” (57). The decision weighed on his shoulders, and he had to give in to going to war. Although this didn’t really happen, the reader can understand that soldiers had a hard choice to make. Through stories, O’Brien conveys his own truth about war to his readers.

Similarly, Green Grass, Running Water is a mixture of stories that teach the reader the truth about Indian Life. Throughout the book, “I” tells a creation story about a woman in four different ways. Each of these stories ends with the woman being taken away to Fort Marion. “First Woman…[is] on that train and there are a bunch of Indians on that train with chains on…Everybody is going to Florida” (105). Fort Marion was a prison in Flordia where Indians who fought against the US government were kept. These stories make it evident to the reader that the events at Fort Marion are a horrible part of Native American history. In the book there are four Indians out to save the world as well. One way they do this is by “fixing” a John Wayne movie so that “none of the Indians fell….the rest of the Indians began to shoot…and soldiers began falling over” (358). John Wayne and his white men usually defeat the Indians, but the story is changed. King uses this story to show his readers the truth of how Native Americans have struggled under the white culture, but also his personal truth that they can rise above it.

Both O’Brien and King’s use of stories provides the reader with each author’s view of truth. Tim O’Brien says that “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (179). That is because stories are universal. The Archetypal lens sees stories as a way to reveal a theme, like truth, to any sort of culture, whether that is war veterans or Native Americans. In Green Grass, Running Water “I” says that “There are no truths…Only stories” (432). Truth is hard to define, but stories have shape and solidity.

The use of stories in both books helps readers relate the author’s truth to their own version. Truth does not have to be the exact events that happened or have a precise definition, but it must teach the reader something. Stories engage the readers of both novels, and they show what truth really is. Transcending cultures, time, and places, stories reveal to us the truth we miss in our own experiences.