By telling stories, you objectify your
own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
You make up others.
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Summary
O’Brien says that “Speaking of Courage” was written at
the request of Norman Bowker who, three years after the story was
written, hanged himself in the YMCA. O’Brien
says that in 1975, right before Saigon finally
collapsed, he received a seventeen-page, handwritten letter from
Bowker saying that he couldn’t find a meaningful use for his life
after the war. He worked several short-lived jobs and lived with
his parents. At one point he enrolled in junior college, but he eventually
dropped out.
In his letter, Bowker told O’Brien that he had read his
first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and that
the book had brought back a great deal of memories. Bowker then
suggested that O’Brien write a story about someone who feels that
Vietnam robbed him of his will to live—he said he would write it
himself but he couldn’t find the words. O’Brien explains that when
he received Bowker’s letter he thought about how easily he transitioned
from Vietnam to graduate school at Harvard University. He thought
that without writing, he himself might have been paralyzed.
While he was working on a new novel entitled Going
After Cacc-iato, O’Brien thought of Bowker’s suggestion
and began a chapter titled “Speaking of Courage.” But, following
Bowker’s request, he did not use Bowker’s name. He substituted his
own hometown scenery for Bowker’s and he omitted the story of the
sewage field and the rain and Kiowa’s death in favor of his own
protagonist’s story. The writing was easy, and he published the
piece as a separate short story. Later, O’Brien realized that the
postwar piece had no place in Going After Cacciato, a
war novel, and that in order to be successful, the story would have
to stand on its own in truth, no matter how much the prospect frightened
O’Brien. When the story was anthologized a year later, O’Brien sent
a copy to Bowker, who was upset about the absence of Kiowa. Eight
months later Bowker hanged himself.
A decade later, O’Brien has revised the story and has
come to terms with it—he says the central incident, about the night
on the Song Tra Bong and the death of Kiowa, has been restored.
But he contends that he does not want to imply that Bowker did not have
a lapse of courage that was responsible for the death of Kiowa.
Analysis
Although “Notes” is the second of three consecutive stories
connected to Kiowa’s death, it is more about O’Brien’s own search
for authenticity in storytelling than about the death itself. “Notes”
is the only one of the three written in first person, which makes
it the story closest to O’Brien’s perspective. O’Brien focuses on
the guilt that he feels not over Kiowa’s death but over his own
attempts to represent it inauthentically. His explanation that most
of his writing comes from the “simple need to talk” illustrates
that his writing is his chosen form of relief from mental anguish.
As such, his success in dealing with his mental anguish is directly
related to his success as a storyteller. Still, relief is not so
easily earned. While O’Brien knows that telling Bowker’s story will
make easier his own grief-n-egotiation process, he struggles to
find the appropriate venue to do so.
While “Speaking of Courage” introduces the postwar Norman Bowker
and illustrates how the guilt he feels in regard to Kiowa’s death
follows him home to Iowa, “Notes” presents O’Brien’s perspective
on Bowker, enriched by the information that Bowker killed himself
fewer than ten years after the war. In many ways, this story is
a complement to “Speaking of Courage” as well as a sequel. The information
provided in Bowker’s letter allows us to understand how seriously
he was affected by the war. Bowker’s actions in “Speaking of Courage”—driving
repeatedly around the lake, trying to strike up a conversation with
the cashier at the A&W, wading in the lake with his clothes
on—may seem incomprehensible, but the added information we gain
from O’Brien’s telling of the story illuminates why he acts as he
does. Bowker’s listlessness in the previous story is accounted for
in the latter—his inability to find a method to communicate his
feelings results in his suicide.
