Abstract
In this now famous and celebrated collection of closely related stories about a U.S. platoon in Vietnam, O’Brien makes a number of philosophically intriguing claims. In this short essay, I develop a thesis that O’Brien’s reflections on the reality of war tell us something very precise about the human condition, namely that it is haunted by contingency. That war is “worse than hell,” a statement made in one of his stories, I read O’Brien as saying that war accentuates and highlights how human existence is essentially chaotic. Our own mortality, which is embedded in every step within life itself, is fully and finally disclosed in war. A temptation then arises to say that war is epistemically valuable in that it reveals and discloses the nature of our lives. I argue that this temptation must be resisted and that O’Brien gives us reasons to resist it within his account. The center of the argument is that stories reveal several aspects of war that war itself does not and cannot reveal. I conclude that if this argument is sound then it will have to point to the ontological value of stories as, in some ways, transcending the meaning of actual experience.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
WAR, REALISM, CONTINGENCY, MORTALITY, MEANING, NARRATIVE
