But, in the next chapter, "Notes," O'Brien invites his readers into his writing studio, so to speak, by describing how the story of Norman Bowker came to be written. In doing so, "O'Brien" explains that some of the information he provided in "Speaking of Courage" was true and some was invented. By pointing out this inconsistency of factual truth, "O'Brien"/O'Brien challenges readers to make judgments about how much they value storytelling and why they value it. For example, do readers need a story to be actual and factual to believe it? Is a story that is fantastical (such as "The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong") valuable? Should it be believed? O'Brien's choice of form raises a fact or fiction debate and also answers it: Any distinction between fact and fiction is a moot point.
For O'Brien, the "factuality" or "fictionality" of a story is, by far, secondary to the effect of the story on the reader. If the work evokes an emotional response, then it is a truth. For "O'Brien"/O'Brien, the primacy of emotion is a metaphorical comment on war: "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story, nothing is ever absolutely true." O'Brien's form, an amalgamation of the choices to share his protagonist's name, to write a series of related vignettes, and the deliberate blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction, is meant to create a loss of the "sense of the definite" in the reader. Literary critic Toby Herzog suggests that "the ambiguity and complexity of the book's form and content also mirror for readers the experience of war."
