Chapter 18: Good Form

In “Good Form,” O'Brien casts doubt on the veracity of the entire novel. Why does he do so? Does it make you more or less interested in the novel? Does it increase or decrease your understanding? What is the difference between “happening-truth” and “story-truth?

• O’Brien casts doubt on the veracity of the entire novel in “Good Form” because it makes the story harder to understand, yet the “happening-truth” is when a person is in what happened. This allows a person to feel as if it was his or her fault when it actually wasn’t. Story truth is the real truth and what did happen, to him. In all, Tim even states it as, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief” (O’Brien ??????). All of this makes the story more confusing and interesting, yet it engages the reader’s curiosity on what actually happen or what seemed to happen.

Reflection:

This chapter tripped the mind as O’Brien was revealing the “actual” truth. For instance, he states, “It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented” (O’Brien ). Although it might’ve been known that the whole novel is fictional, all the events seem so strategically placed and so real. This makes the reader think what’s actually real in the chapters after this one, especially since Tim says that he and his daughter visited the place where Kiowa died. Is his daughter even real or did this event even happen? This chapter just goes to show how stories, particularly those that are made up, can reveal some truths in revelations about the war.