From the first sentence of the chapter, O’Brien begins to impress, however subtly, the importance of the novel’s form, a blend of war autobiography and writer’s memoir. Readers should note that a writer’s memoir is a form of autobiography. Generally, a writer’s memoir is more essayistic and contemplative than an autobiography, in which an author recounts scenes from his or her own life. Writer’s memoirs frequently describe how a writer writes and what the conditions were—mental and emotional—that surrounded the production of some literary or journalistic work. The admission that “this is one story I’ve never told before” signals two points to the reader. First, the story establishes a confessional tone and creates an immediate empathy between the reader and the O’Brien character. Second, in the context of the preceding chapter, the reader knows that this is an unresolved story, perhaps a fragment of memory that, given O’Brien’s philosophy of storytelling, is being crafted into a story as a means for understanding the events of the past.
Yet the story is not fragmentary and disconnected, abruptly moving between memories. The overall form of the chapter is narrative, though the stream-of-consciousness interjection of raw emotions interrupts the story’s fluidity. For example, when O’Brien discusses the justifications that apparently underpinned U.S. involvement in the war, he writes that “the very facts were shrouded in uncertainty” and that “the only certainty that summer was moral confusion.” This political discourse O’Brien provides is the real-world macrocosm version of the personal microcosm of “moral uncertainty” that distressed him during the summer of 1968. The uncertainty continues to disturb him until he takes this “act of remembrance” and makes sense of moral disorder by committing it to paper and formulating it into a story for the narrator himself and the novel’s readers to understand.
An important difference exists between the physical and sensory detail O’Brien employs at the beginning of the chapter, or rather the lack of it, and the attention paid to it at the chapter’s close. “O’Brien” describes his stance against the war as “almost entirely an intellectual activity. . . . I felt no personal danger.” His precise use of detail mirrors an internal change in O’Brien as he is described in physical detail.
An example of this detail is the contrast of O’Brien’s work in the meatpacking plant to the future that he hopes awaits him in graduate school. O’Brien works in the meatpacking plant as a summer job, not as an occupation that will become a full-time career. He has aspirations, and those aspirations are higher than working in such conditions. Work in the plant, for O’Brien, is nearly an indignity, an indignity that is surpassed only by his participation in a war that he morally opposes. O’Brien offers this variation in detail for the following reason: the former, with its “dense greasy pig-stink,” elicits a strong reaction from the reader. The effect also appears when Elroy Berdahl perceptively tells O’Brien that he had wondered about the smell. The metaphor of the pork product assembly line also extends to the military machine that drafts soldiers and sends them to war.
O’Brien only took action to evade the draft and follow his own inclinations rather than follow the expectations of his community after he “felt something break open in [his] chest…a physical rupture—a cracking-leaking-popping feeling.” O’Brien reprises this idea when “O’Brien” revisits the shit field (“Field Trip”) and when Timmy/O’Brien learns of Linda’s death (“The Lives of the Dead”). He creates a complex relationship between physical detail, his ability to understand the story of his own life, and the audience’s ability to understand the vicarious lessons of war, even if those lessons are paradoxical.
O’Brien sets up paradoxical relationships that are revisited in various forms throughout the novel. One such paradox is that of courage and fear. He explains that he was “ashamed to be doing the right thing” in following his conscience and going to Canada. Because this paradox is a reversal of commonly held notions about courage in war, O’Brien—who has never told the story of his flight to the Tip Top Lodge before—needs to “write” a story as a means for structuring a way to understand the paradox and come to terms with it.
This meta-fictive means of imposing meaning on moral disorder and personal conflict is not the only storytelling O’Brien does in this chapter. He actually tries to do the same thing in the middle of the Rainy River—he “slipped out of his own skin” and watched himself (much like Elroy Berdahl watched and read O’Brien) in his attempts to decide whether he should escape to Canada. At the end of the chapter, however, the importance of the physicality of “O’Brien” reemerges. O’Brien was literally paralyzed as he tried to force himself from the boat. So it follows that he had denied his own feelings and submitted to the schemas of stories of other people, like the older generation of veterans whom he despises, and to what he considered cowardice—at least until finally telling this story.
