SOURCE: An interview in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 1-11.

[In the following interview, originally conducted on April 20, 1989, O'Brien talks about his literary influences, characters and thematic concerns, and the relationships between memory, imagination, and literature.]

Tim O'Brien is widely considered the best of a talented group of Vietnam veterans who have devoted much of their writing to their war experiences. Sections of his most recent book, The Things They Carried, have won a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Prize and have been included in Best American Short Stories. It follows by twelve years his National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato, which until recently was often called the best work of fiction to come out of the war; the critical reaction to The Things They Carried, however, now makes it a prime candidate for that accolade. The latest book resists easy categorization: it is part novel, part collection of stories, part essays, part journalism; it is, more significantly, all at the same time. As O'Brien indicates below, he may have created a new literary form. His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, a memoir of his year in Vietnam; Northern Lights, an out-of-print novel about two brothers who become lost on a cross-country skiing trip in Minnesota; and The Nuclear Age, about a man who, while building a bomb shelter in 1995, recalls his life as a radical.

This interview took place at O'Brien's home in Boxford, Massachusetts, about twenty-five miles north of Boston, on April 20, 1989. O'Brien had completed writing The Things They Carried and was working on some final revisions.

[Naparsteck:] You have two Pauls in your fiction, Paul Perry in Northern Lights and Paul Berlin in Going After Cacciato. Is that just a coincidence?

[O'Brien:] I doubt it's a coincidence, though I can't explain it. The first Paul, the Northern Lights Paul—that's a terrible book. I'm embarrassed by it; it's hard to talk about it. It's the first novel I ever tried to write, and unfortunately it was published. It was done logically. Paul was chosen for Paul on the road to Damascus, the Damascus Lutheran Church [which appears in the novel], all the imagery of light throughout the book. The same thing with his middle name, Milton—you know, blindness. Whereas Paul Berlin: just sound. No reason for it.

Why do you say that you're embarrassed by Northern Lights? It seems to me to have a lot of things that an early book has, a lot of easy Hemingway references, for example.

That's part of it. I was under two influences: one was Hemingway, one was Faulkner. They both penetrate that book every which way, but beyond that there are a lot of other flaws with it. Overwriting is probably the chief flaw of the book. It's maybe a hundred pages too long. Too much gratuitous repetition. I continue to use repetition in my work to this day, but not so that it's done just for its own sake. I think that if at some point I were to run out of ideas for a new work I might go back to Northern Lights and rewrite it. I've done that with Cacciato over the last year and a half or so; I've rewritten substantial portions that are appearing in the latest edition. Northern Lights would require at least two years of work. The story is O.K., the essential story, that wilderness stuff. The rest of it needs a lot of work, and someday I think I may do it.

The ski trip is what you see as the heart of the book, then?

Yeah, the essential story. I like some of the other stuff, but the other stuff is out of proportion to the narrative heart of the book, I think. I know.

The opening strikes me as in many ways very appealing, with Harvey coming back from Vietnam. I think a lot of stories about returning veterans oversentimentalize the return, which Northern Lights doesn't do; it's one of the very few stories about a veteran coming home that seems to get things right.

Yeah, I think those parts I do like. The story about two brothers and the father is solid, and Harvey's not sentimentalized. He's a good, hard character; I like his character. Still, it's a question of language. Language equals content. Unfortunately, there are so many echoes that are Hemingwayesque—language coming out of Harvey's mouth and descriptions and things that get in the way.

Were you conscious of writing with these Hemingwayesque influences?

I was trying to parody Hemingway. I wrote the book not knowing it was going to be published. I was just a beginner, and I was sort of having fun with it, so I tried to spoof The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and I thought I did a pretty neat job of doing the spoofs, but unfortunately good literature should be more than just gamesmanship, and I think there is too much gamesmanship in that book.

Let's move to a book you like better. Is Cacciato's decision to leave the war related to his refusal to touch the grenade? You never specifically say that.

It's never said directly, because Cacciato is never there to say it, but, yes, I think it's related pretty directly. The chronology of the book—of which I am fond—is all scrambled throughout the narrative. You can actually map that this event happened first, second, third, and his departure follows pretty quickly after. Refusing to touch the grenade is the first war event prior to his departure. I don't think it's necessarily the only reason for his running, but in a way it's got to be so. I try to keep him off in the horizon and try to keep his motives as removed as he is physically from the rest of the men; they can never figure out precisely what his motives were.

There's something else that's never said directly: is that the grenade that kills the lieutenant?

Again, definitely the lieutenant's off-stage; there's no scene where they kill him. No, maybe it's a different grenade; the grenade is symbolic. I've always pictured it as being the same grenade, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.

And it would be the black guy, Oscar, who throws the grenade?

I think that once they've all touched it, it doesn't much matter. It's like naming the executioner of Ted Bundy; who killed Bundy? It was the state, the whole judicial system. I don't know who threw the grenade; I don't think it very much matters.

Except that a guy like Berlin might be able to touch the grenade, but I have a hard time seeing him being able to throw it.

I have a hard time seeing him do it, too, but I don't have a hard time, for example, seeing Stink do it. He's the sort of guy you'd expect to throw it. Oscar certainly would be a main candidate. But, as I say, I don't think it really matters. If I had to take a guess, it would probably be Oscar who's done it.

Not answering questions like that in the book, is that deliberate?

Yes. It's a question of what matters, I guess, both to the writer and the reader. It doesn't matter to me who did it. It's like if you were doing a scene of the execution of Bundy and you suddenly were to concentrate on the executioner, who's really a stand-in character. The key thing is that touching.

Do you ever feel that you've written so much about Vietnam that you've been typecast, tike the town drunk?

Yeah, I do. I can't deny it's part of my material, my life, things I care about. Even if I don't write often, specifically, about Vietnam, a lot of the stuff, for example in The Nuclear Age and in Northern Lights—courage and obligation and so on—flows from that experience. Beyond that, I think all writers get typecast. I think Melville is typecast as a sea writer. And Conrad certainly is. Updike is a suburban-hyphen-domestic affairs writer. Shakespeare is a king writer. That has to happen, because an author like any other human being naturally gravitates toward a center of concerns that are particularly his or hers. Being typecast still irritates me at times, but not enough to make me say I'm not going to write about Vietnam, because I am, and I'm sure I will in the future.

Your characters spend a great deal of time thinking about courage, which is a fairly common subject for Vietnam stories, but you handle it differently. One symbol that comes up a lot in other writers is John Wayne; Ron Kovic, for example, implicitly rejects that symbolism. You never mention John Wayne, and you do not write of courage as something that drew you to Vietnam. You handle courage in a more realistic way.

It's such a complicated subject, it's hard to know what to say. It's easy to break down courage into categories. There's moral courage versus physical courage and so on. Even that seems oversimplifying it. To break it down into categories of John Wayne and Socrates, for instance, seems to me to be really artificial. Like everything else, courage interpenetrates the whole fabric of a life. To take a strand out and say this is courage and this is something else violates a central humanness. In my own particular case, I hated the war in Vietnam and didn't want to go. I had no desire to test my capacity to charge a bunker; I had no desire to do that. Some guys did. And I never really understood it, from the moment of basic training. Why would guys want to die? Take the chance of dying? I just didn't get it. So I think my perspective on the issue probably varies a lot from that of a guy like Kovic who wanted to test himself. My concerns aren't those of other people, and the writing probably echoes that.

It seems that your characters are very much concerned about courage, but they typically don't reach conclusions about it. You're not really making a statement about one type of courage being better than another.

The best literature is always explorative. It's searching for answers and never finding them. It's almost like Platonic dialogue. If you knew what courage is, if you had a really wonderful, philosophical explication of courage, you would do it as philosophy, as explication; you wouldn't write fiction. Fiction is a way of testing possibilities and testing hypotheses, and not defining, and so I think that more than anything the work is a way of me saying, yes, courage is clearly important in this character's life; he thinks about its importance in circumstances; the work is a way of searching for courage, finding out what it is. That's especially true in Cacciato, I think, where it's both a search for courage for him to walk away from that war and also a kind of search for what courage is, what the courageous thing to do is.

Your first three books differ from the fourth in the treatment of courage. Courage doesn't seem to be a major theme in Nuclear Age, which is more about figuring out what sanity is and is not. Do you think it was inevitable that in moving away from Vietnam you would move away from courage as a dominating topic?

It's the same issue. It's like the other side of the coin in that this guy in The Nuclear Age had the courage to do what I didn't and a lot of other people didn't, which is to risk embarrassment and censure and endure humiliation about walking away from the war. If there's a courageous character in that book, it's that William character, who despite his service in a kind of Waspism and his wimpy attitude toward the war manages to do for the most part what he thinks is right. So I think it's not a departure from the earlier work but a looking at it from another angle. To me, he's the only hero I've written.

It seems to me that in your first three books you were dealing with philosophical issues, such as courage, while The Nuclear Age is more political. Do you feel that way?

Not really. I see all four books as political in that they all deal with the impact of global forces on individual lives. In my own life and in If I Die, this huge thing—global politics—pushed me into the war, and similarly in The Nuclear Age, William Cowling is pushed into hiding and pushed away from his own life by global politics. I think anything I've ever written has that as its center theme, even more than issues of courage—how individual human lives are influenced by global forces beyond the horizon.

I sensed in reading The Nuclear Age that you were coming close to making a statement there, saying we should do something about this nuclear madness.

I don't think I was making a statement; I certainly wasn't trying to. I was trying to write a comedy, basically, and a book that was funny, and I think the real difference between The Nuclear Age and the earlier works is tone. It had a more comedic tone to it. I'm not sure people cared for that. But my intent was to be different—like Shakespeare saying, "My subject may be life and death, but I want to have a comedic perspective on it."

The reviewers were not always kind to The Nuclear Age. Do you think a lot of them missed the comedic intent?

That's probably it. I was trying to write a funny book. I think it is funny. But it's up to the ages. Cacciato may, a hundred years from now, not be read at all, while The Nuclear Age could be. The best road for most writers is to turn them out at the time. Moby Dick, for example, was trashed, worse than Nuclear Age. It was "the most hideous piece of garbage ever written," and what happens is that over time, I think, these things straighten themselves out. You can't as a writer defend your work or knock it. You have to say, "Let time take care of it." So I don't get too excited about bad reviews or good ones. I feel happy if they're good, feel sad if they're bad, but the feelings disappear pretty quickly, because ultimately I'm not writing for my contemporaries but for the ages, like every good writer should be. You're writing for history, in the hope that your book—out of the thousands that are published each year—might be the last to be read a hundred years from now and enjoyed.

Was the story "Speaking of Courage" originally intended to be part of Cacciato?

Yes. It was a piece I took out. It's kind of an orphan. I've since rewritten it for The Things They Carried—pretty substantially rewritten it, in fact, changing everything except the lake, driving around the lake, but all the war stuff has been completely changed, and now I'm really fond of the story. I didn't care for it at all when it was originally written.

Is that why it was left out of Cacciato?

Partly that and partly because it just didn't fit. It's a postwar story; Cacciato was a war story, and it just didn't have a proper home in that book.

In rewriting it, you changed the character from Paul Berlin to Tim O'Brien.

The character becomes Tim, even though the Tim character is made up entirely, and then the Tim is transformed again into another guy, another character in The Things They Carried named Norman Bowker.

Is the Tim character Tim O'Brien? In "The Lives of the Dead" there's a Timmy O'Brien.

Yeah, it is, in part. It's made up, but I use my own name. The Things They Carried is sort of half novel, half group of stories. It's part nonfiction, too: some of the stuff is commentary on the stories, talking about where a particular one came from. "Speaking of Courage," for example, came from a letter I received from a guy named Norman Bowker, a real guy, who committed suicide after I received his letter. He was talking to me in his letter about how he just couldn't adjust to coming home. It wasn't bad memories; it was that he couldn't talk to anybody about it. He didn't know what to say; he felt inarticulate. All he could do was drive around and around in his hometown in Iowa, around this lake. In the letter he asked me to write a story about it, and I did. This was after I published If I Die.

Was this somebody you knew?

Yeah, in Vietnam. I sent him the story after it was published, and he said he liked it. Then I didn't hear from him for a long time. His mother finally wrote me. I wrote her and she wrote back saying he committed suicide by hanging himself in the locker room of a YMCA. So that's the terrible-happening anecdote that I include after the story in The Things They Carried. The commentary is partly about writing sources and partly about the writing itself.

The Things They Carried is my best book. There's no doubt in my mind about it. When I was writing Cacciato I had that feeling; I have that feeling now. I can tell by the strangeness of it. It's a new form, I think. I blended my own personality with the stories, and I'm writing about the stories, and yet everything is made up, including the commentary. The story about Norman Bowker is made up. There was no Norman Bowker. The point being, among others, that in fiction we not only transform reality, we sort of invent our own lives, invent our histories, our autobiographies. When Melville wrote Moby Dick, he was inventing himself, for posterity.

Have you ever been approached about doing movies?

Cacciato and The Nuclear Age have both been taken by the movies. I've seen a few scripts. I've seen three on Cacciato, none of which are any good. There are some good parts in them, but by and large they tend to take all the dreamlike, fantastic, surrealistic elements of the book out and tell a pretty straightforward, realistic story, which to me violates the whole aboutness of the book. The book is about the interweaving of memory on the one hand and the imagination, how one frees the other and back again, and that's gone. To me you don't have Cacciato anymore; you've got some new thing. I was asked to write a screenplay of the book, and I said "No," because you end up having to do what they did. You have to, the way movies are made. You have to screw up your own work, and if it's going to be screwed up, I would prefer that somebody else do it, not me.

I've seen the term "magical realism" used in connection with your writing. Do you think Cacciato fits into that grouping?

I don't know. I think the term is a shorthand way of saying something that's much more complicated than that. No writer wants to be grouped in any category. Writing is being an individual; it's a creative enterprise, and a writer wants to make an individual, creative statement that's unrelated to anything that's been said before or afterward yet is simultaneously totally related not just to one thing but to everything. "Magical realism" is shorthand for imagination and memory and how they interlock, for what realism is, for what's real and not real.

"How to Tell a True War Story" in The Things They Carried seems to me to be very directly about the interlocking of memory and what actually happened. It also strikes me that this story is as much an essay as it is a story. Did you have that sense in writing it?

It's a mixture, yes. It's like the rest of the book, in that it's part story, just raw story—six guys go up to the listening post in the mountains—and also a discussion about the making of the story, not a discussion by me as much as by the guys themselves. In a way it's part essay and part fiction, but in a way it's neither. I think that when you're reading the thing you have a total effect. To me, it has a singleness or unity to it. Rather than being part this and part that, it's all those things together. That story is the genesis for the idea for the whole book. When I'm talking about a happening, it seems essayish, but that stuff is invented and imagined; it isn't true in a literal sense. I don't, for example, believe that war is beautiful in any aesthetic way whatsoever. Even though the character sounds like me and says pretty pointblankly that war is beautiful, the harmonies and shapes and proportions, it's not me saying that. The guy who's narrating this story has my name and a lot of my characteristics, but it isn't really me, I never felt or thought that war's pretty, even though I can see how people such as Bill Broyles have said that. My personal feeling is that it's pretty ugly. I was in danger, and my perception never let me see any beauty. All I felt was fear. What I'm saying is that even with that nonfiction-sounding element in the story, everything in the story is fiction, beginning to end. To try to classify different elements of the story as fact or fiction seems to me artificial. Literature should be looked at not for its literal truths but for its emotional qualities. What matters in literature, I think, are pretty simple things—whether it moves me or not, whether it feels true. The actual literal truth should be superfluous. For example, here's a story: four guys go on a trail, a grenade sails out, one guy jumps on it, takes the blast, and saves his buddies. Is it true? Well, yeah, it may have happened, but it doesn't feel true, because it feels stereotypical, hackneyed; it feels like Hollywood. But here's another story: four guys go on a trail, a grenade sails out, one guy jumps on it, takes the blast, and dies; before he dies, though, one of the guys says, "What the fuck you do that for?" and the dead guy says, "The story of my life, man," and starts to smile. He's dead. That didn't happen. Clearly, ever, and yet there's something about the absurdity of it and the horror of it—"What the fuck you do that for?"—which seems truer to me than something which might literally have happened. A story's truth shouldn't be measured by happening but by an entirely different standard, a standard of emotion, feeling—"Does it ring true?" as opposed to "Is it true?"

The narrator of "How to Tell a True War Story" comes to a different understanding of what happens at the end of the story than he had at the beginning. At the end he climbs into the tree to pick out parts of his friend, who's died in an explosion, giving the impression that he didn't quite understand the truth at the beginning, maybe because it was too difficult to remember, too hard on him. It's the exercising of his imagination that gets him at the truth.

Yes, I think it is. I think exercising the imagination is the main way of finding truth, that if you take almost any experience of your own life that means something to you, that really hits you, let's say the death of your mother, over the course of time your imagination is going to do things with that experience to render it into something that you can deal with and that has meaning to it. You're going to select some details and forget others: she's lying in bed dying for five weeks; you're not going to remember every detail of that; you're going to pick out of your memory, pluck out, certain conspicuous elements, and then you're going to reorder them. The experience that you remember is going to have a power to it that the total experience didn't have. You went to fix breakfast while she was dying, the phone rang, you had to deal with it—all that random stuff that you've forgotten will be rearranged by your imagination into a new kind of experience. I think in war we tend to block out the long, hard moments of boredom, standing around, sitting around, waiting, which is a lot of what war is. It's ninety-nine percent monotony, and what the imagination does is to push that away and take what's left and reorder it into patterns that give meaning to it.

In Cacciato you have the observation post scenes, which seem to be almost directly essays, and in one of them you talk about how to use imagination. There are a lot of dream sequences in literature, but Berlin is not really dreaming; he's wide awake, and he's controlling what he's thinking about, and what he thinks about makes up half the novel.

Dreams are dangerous. I don't think I've ever used a real dream. Berlin is awake the same way you and I are now, only alone, and he's staring at the beach and thinking; he's imagining in a way we all do at times. It's a kind of daydream, but it's not an Alice in Wonderland or Hobbity sort of thing where events happen at random that come only from the subconscious. It's a mixture of the subconscious and the directed, the same way stories are written. What Berlin is doing is what I do with a typewriter: I'm half living in a rational world and half living in a kind of trance, imagining. Berlin's process in the observation post was meant, at least in part, to echo my own process of imagining that book—not dreaming it and not just controlling it, but a trancelike, half-awake, half-alert imagining.

A lot of guys from Vietnam go to the Breadloaf writers conference in Vermont because they know you teach there every summer.

There are always some, which is good.

They usually try to select you as their teacher.

They try to. They don't always get me. I think of myself not as a soldier anymore. That's all over. I think of myself as someone who now and then writes about the war, but my daily concerns are just the same as yours. When you're writing a book about Vietnam you don't think of yourself as a soldier; you think of yourself as a writer. The subject matter is war, and you're trying to make a sentence that's graceful, you're trying to make a character come alive, you're trying to make a scene shake with meaning and also with a dramatic feel; your attention is on writing that matters. I feel bad when I meet a vet who thinks that because we both shared this soldiering thing we can also share the other thing, writing, without work, and to me writing is really hard work. Anybody who's done it knows that just making a simple sentence is work. My chief asset as a human being, as a writer, is that I'm tenacious; I work just constantly, stubbornly, and like it. I mean I really like it—I get angry, I feel rotten, if somebody calls me in the middle of work and says, "Let's go play golf," because I like writing that much. If you want to be a writer, you've got to learn to be an eagle soaring up above and a mule who keeps climbing and climbing and climbing.