Tim O’Brien, a contemporary American novelist and short story writer of
immense, imaginative power, freely admits that the Vietnam War was the dark,
jarring experience that made him a writer. O’Brien served in Vietnam with the
Fifth Battalion, Forty-six infantry from January 1969 to March 1970. He
patrolled some of the most active and brutal sites of the war and it definitely
showed in the settings of his writing. Before his induction into the army,
O’Brien felt traumatized on the decision of whether to stay in the United
States or to flee to Canada. He finally convinced himself to go for the reason
that it was his duty. O’Brien returned to America sound of mind and body if
not in spirit. He wrote of his war experience in a “spare, poetically elusive,
and classically toned personal memoir.”(Myers 140) Thomas Myers states that,
“O’Brien examines the wrenching transformation of sense and sensibility in
fictions that are evocative, challenging meetings of imagination and memory, of
the created and the recreated, of the impossible and the possible.”(Myers140)
O’Brien uses much of Hemmingway’s style in his work- despair, rhythmic
repetition of key words and phrases; the hard, discipline control of idea and
emotion in sentences and paragraphs that are models of the stoic understatement;
the darkly ironic gestures; and the classical imperatives of courage and
cowardliness, transgression and expiation, of Hemmingway’s best stories and
novels. O’Brien is a natural storyteller who can spin a tale with the best of
them. He is also a figure who would cast off from safe harbors and dive deeply
into the primal American soul and psyche. O’Brien explores a few specific
subjects and themes: the continual interplay of fact and imagination in fiction
and in life; the compulsive, absurd, noble quest for human truth; the difficulty
in defining and obtaining the elusive quality of courage; and the ongoing human
need for the fragile, made up, explanatory device we call story. O’Brien’s
prime theme is not that war maims and destroys but that storytelling explains,
connects, and ultimately saves the teller and the listener. The two great themes
that are instilled in all of his novels and short fiction: the ongoing quest to
acquire or simply to define courage and the desperate need to attain redemption
after sin. In his memoir, If I Die In A Combat Zone, O’Brien “ established
his literary voice by creating a striking personal meditation with somber,
classical tones and poetic effect, and he offers a version of himself who is
both a participant telling one man’s story and a symbolic emissary of his
culture who exchanges traditional and pop culture myth for the hard-earned
knowledge of the personal transgression and historical experience.”(Myers 144)
In his book, Northern Lights, O’Brien made an early attempt to isolate and
explore both the male and the female in every human being, fictional or real.
O’Brien explained that men and women are different, but not that different. In
Northern Lights, he shows the common traits between the opposite genders. In The
Nuclear Age, O’Brien’ treatment of the New Left is satiric, and the
characters are often deliberate. “ What becomes clear in the novel is
O’Brien’s own ambivalence to the leftist politics, the civil disobedience,
and the cultural upheaval of America in the 1960s and the 1970s.” (Myers 150)
O’Brien combines a subtle blend of imagination and memory to give his readers
a taste of the surreal past of his characters. In his next book, The Things They
Carried, the establish subjects and themes were: the search for a workable
definition of courage; the need to transmute terrible memory into a livable
present; the responsibility of the living to the dead to keep them alive
somehow; the wonderful, terrible nature of storytelling itself. The narrator and
central character was named Tim O’Brien and was modeled after his creator, but
both are and are not the “ real “ one. In this book, there is not only a
pronounced metafictional feel – the implicit argument for the utter
interchangeability and fluity of life and art – but also the perception by the
reader that finally any attempt to separate the author from the narrator-hero is
a fool’s errand. In Going after Cacciato, the very themes of the book are
imagination and memory. O’Brien makes it clear how the power of our dreams
also creates what we call the real world. In The Lake of the Woods, O’Brien
offers a depiction of human mystery, secret sin, and the dark, tragic effects of
contemporary American history that again rubs away the artificial line between
the literary and historical imagination but does so in new, unexpected ways.
This book is most truly about men and women: love, marriage, and the terrible,
inevitable secrets husbands and wives keep from each other. The portrayal of
well-intentioned hearts coming to terms with their own capacities for weakness,
for deceit, for failure, and, sometimes, for real evil. In conclusion, O’Brien
sums his own style up the best with the words, “ Truth doesn’t reside in the
surface of events. Truth resides in those deeper moments of punctuation, when
things explode. So you compress the boredom down, hinting at it but always going
for drama – because the essence of the experience was dramatic. You tell lies
to get to the truth.” Tim O’Brien digs deeply into the American psyche and
comes out with an innovative and fascinating style of writing.

Bibliography
1. Myers, Thomas.DLB 152.New York: Saint Norbert College,1995.