Tim O Brien Metafiction Analysis

Metafiction is a literary device that makes a reader question what is reality and what is fiction. Tim O’Brien uses metafiction, in his chapter “How to Tell a True War Story”, to tell the reader how one can pick out a true war story as he is telling a war story. He uses this technique to emphasize how real the stories were to keep himself sane and get his bottled-up emotions off his chest. In the chapter “Notes”, O’Brien tells the reader a story about a man named Norman Bowker. Bowker committed suicide a few years after returning home from war. Before he passed, he wrote O’Brien a lengthy letter in which he explained that he had lost the will to live after the war. He was reaching out to O’Brien to tell him that his first novel had brought back numerous memories from the war, and then he suggested that O’Brien should “write
In chapter 7, O’Brien is telling the readers how to tell a true war story. He says it should be “difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (44) if it is a true war story, and they “cannot be believed” (44). He points out, before he tells any stories, that every story should not be completely believed, and if it is then the believer should be skeptical to if it is real. Majority of the stories told in the novel are either made up or extremely exaggerated. When he talks about Kiowa and Bowker he says “you start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but nonetheless help to clarify and explain” (101), he clearly explains that the stories are added on to get the point across. He uses fake characters and fake stories to tell every reader what really happened to him in war. O’Brien uses metafiction in the whole novel to give the readers an imaginable mental picture that would take them to the exact experience the character had to