Tim O'Brien and his literary works

Tim O'brien

The Truth of Trauma

The primary thing that we learn about the effects of trauma from Susan Faludi and Tim O'Brien in regards to the effects of trauma is that it has the inherent ability to distort reality. Susan Faludi strongly alludes to this fact in her essay entitled "The Naked Citadel," which largely chronicles the fourth-class system of an elite paramilitary academy. In this academy, wanton violence and misogyny is tolerated and, in certain instances, permitted. O'Brien's literary work, "How to Tell a True War Story," discusses the effects of war (primarily through the example of the Vietnam War) and its ramifications in recalling events that take place during such belligerent encounters. In both of these works there is a substantial amount of trauma that results in a distortion of reality, and in certain instances, a distortion of truth.

O'Brien makes this point very clear rather early on in his essay. When he is recalling the death of one of the soldiers he was stationed with in Vietnam, he gives the reader fair warning that when telling stories about the traumatic events that take place in war, it is difficult to distinguish the truth from how one remembers the event. The following quotation provides an excellent example of this effect of trauma. "When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again… and then afterward when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but in reality represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed" (O'Brien, 271). This distortion of reality, of what is actually true, is also manifested within Faludi's work. She describes a particularly brutal assault on a 'knob' (a first year student within the Citadel) in which students struck the underclassmen in their generals and forcibly removed the hair from their chests while carrying out more conventional forms of assault. An interview with one of the attackers shows how such a traumatic event -- even for the attackers who spawned it -- can distort the truth. "One of the offending cadets, Adrien Baer, told me that he and the other accused sophomore, Jeremy Leckie, did indeed come back from drinking, burst into the knobs room after 10 p.m., and "repeatedly struck them in the chest and stomach" and bruised one of them in the face, but he denied having kicked them in the groin and yanked out chest hair" (Faludi, 86). This quotation indicates a conflict in the facts that took place in a traumatic event of violence. Although the former student may have been purposefully fibbing to Faludi about parts of the assault, the incongruence of his stories with the version told to her is demonstrative of the fact that traumatic events can distort the truth -- particularly if that former student simply does not recall parts of the assault that he denies.

Furthermore, in environments that are highly conducive to trauma, such as war or a paramilitary educational institution that is predominantly filled with Caucasian males who are permitted to attack one another during a certain period in their careers, conventional morals can also become distorted .The differences of right and wrong that apply to the outside world, the world that was inhabited by people before they left it to take place in an environment highly dissimilar to the one that reality largely takes place in no longer apply. The following quotation from Mitchell in which he is describing this aspect of Vietnam demonstrates this fact. "The old rules riles are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong" (O'Brien, 276). Although O'Brien is making this statement about war, it applies into other realms conducive to trauma such as the Citadel, a traditionally all-male institution in which younger, weaker students were to take on the roles of women, as the following quotation shows. "The beaten knobs were the women, "stripped" and humiliated, and the predatory upperclassmen were the men, who bullied and pillaged" (Faludi, 90). The distortion of reality in such a situation is clear, particularly since both upperclassmen and lowerclassmen were males. However, in a situation such as this in which trauma regularly occurs, the usual rules of reality inevitably become distorted.

In conclusion, the primary thing that both authors teach readers about trauma is that it has an efficacious proclivity to distort the truth and perceptions of reality. The difficulty that O'Brien describes in the accuracy of war stories, and which can be found in Faludi's interview of the students who pulled chest hair out of underclassmen (due to the inconsistence in the recollections of that event) alludes to this fact, as does the attempt to make underclassmen women and the difficulty in applying old rules of reality to situations of war.