In this final chapter, the various threads of the work are finally woven together to form a cohesive message. Each of the major themes is illuminated as each of the major stories is retold. The cohesive core of the chapter is the present of “O’Brien” and his practice of what he referred to as his “Good Form” previously in the book: He objectifies his own experience, writing about himself alternating between the first- and third-person narrative voices.
“O’Brien” employs language and storytelling to postpone loss. This can be seen through the paradox of the chapter’s title; “O’Brien” does bring characters back to life, imagining and animating them beyond the limits of tangible, sensory life. It is a kind of escapism, a way to think about a situation from another vantage point to understand it in a different way. Throughout the novel, characters employ this kind of mental escapism when thinking of home and other memories because it provides a familiar comfort and a way to impose meaning on events.
The narrative situation that O’Brien presents in the final chapter is complicated because it tries to make sense of many of the stories that have been told and retold throughout. He offers readers a story within a story within a story. The general frame is one of an author and veteran thinking about Vietnam. As the author recollects and presents a story about animating the dead—the scene with the toast to the dead Vietnamese—another story within that story unfolds, O’Brien recollecting the death of his childhood friend, Linda. This layer of stories characterizes the power of stories as devices for ordering the events of life and figuring out one’s response to those events.
O’Brien also revisits the problem of defining a “war story” as if it were a definitive genre. As the sequence of “O’Brien’s” memories and O’Brien’s stories unfold, the “war story” of the dead Vietnamese man gives way to become a story about love that demonstrates the power of stories to memorialize the dead. Symbolically, memorials are for the living more so than they are for the dead. They serve as reminders and as mediums for those who have lost someone or something to focus their grief on. Memorials exist at the intersection of the past and the present, and they also help the living remember that they are alive, which ultimately is the denouement of this chapter and the novel: The stories serve to save Timmy’s life. And the impetus for the stories in the first place is the deep longing “Tim” and “Timmy” feel, like Lt. Cross’ longing for Martha’s love, like Rat’s despondent slaughter of the baby buffalo, and how these become “O’Brien’s” memorial to the men of Alpha Company, bridging the temporal gap between past and present and the epistemological gap between story and meaning.
