Tim O'Brien is in my head...

So far, including In the Lake of the Woods, I've read two of O'Brien's novels, and I've enjoyed both of them. I think what appeals to me in his novels is the way he writes about human experiences. The way Tim O'Brien writes about experiences during the Vietnam War is how we recall and relay traumatic memories to others, and that makes it easier to read; because the story is set up in a way that the human mind recalls any episodic memory (memory of events you've experienced), it’s easier to understand and follow.

Say something traumatic happens to you, like you got mugged. You call the police and they ask you to give them a statement. You’ll try to tell them what the mugger looked like, what was happening, how it happened, and so on. Then you meet your friends the next day and you start to tell them the story of what happened. This time around you’re going to be much more dramatic; a lot more emotion is going to go into the telling of your story. Your story also gets changed and modified, new details are added when you remember them. The event as a whole gets warped somehow, the significant parts become more dominant, the not so significant fade away.

O’Brien’s form of writing follows that convention. If you’ve read The Things They Carried, you know that the book is about the author’s experience, and the experiences of the rest of his platoon. There were four or five main events that he covered in the novel, but the way it was organized was not short story after short story. Details would unfold as you read on, and the story would become more wholesome, more detailed. New bits of imagery would be added on to what you already knew.

What’s so interesting about this is not just the fact that O’Brien captures an important part of human psychology. His purpose in writing the stories this way seems to be to make the audience feel the emotions more intimately. He makes it seem like the reader is the one recalling these memories; that the memories belong to the reader and the author.

Since novels are set up in a way that resembles the way we already think and process information and memory, it's easier to follow. O'Brien repeats some bits of detail over and over, but each time he adds another bit, just like you would if you were telling the story of how you got mugged to different friends.