O'Brien's writing very openly paints a picture of the psychological repercussions of his own experiences with war; it's particularly revealing about the specific incident he returns to over and over again, in which a fellow soldier named Lemon died stepping on a land mine. There are many things that can be drawn from O'Brien's narrative structure that can be directly attributed to his having witnessed the event first hand and having been traumatized psychological by it.
For starters, he masks the whole story under the premise of bringing forth some kind of truth about war stories--it's as if O'Brien wants us to believe that he doesn't have personal attachments to the stories that he is giving as examples towards whatever point he is trying to make. Which is unclear, possibly because he doesn't really have a point in saying all of this. This avoidant response is one of the symptoms of PTSD; it's an inability to recall an important aspect of the trauma in order to avoid calling up the feelings associated with it. Eventually, it becomes clear that these stories do actually involve him personally and the thin veil of "how to write a true war story" is less distracting (although O'Brien persistently returns to it again and again.)
Through the repetition of the story of Lemon's death, we see how more and more details--extremely vivid and specific details-- are added to the story each time, as if O'Brien is getting closer and closer to the truth, and closer to what he actually wants to say. This [initial] avoidance and repetition of Lemon's death are definitely symptoms of O'Brien's trauma having witnessed such a horrible thing happen, and it's probably the only way he can really process it. It's also quite possible, along the lines of what O'Brien suggests, "[telling] it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth," that the details that change from telling to telling are a result of the teller's own mind trying to wrestle with the reality of what happened.
Patrick, you definitely made a great point about how at first Tim O'Brien is trying to make the readers believe that he has no personal attachments to his stories, when in fact he does and is evident when he constantly repeats the story while changes details of the event. In a sense, I see Tim O'Brien as trying to be two different people, one being a storyteller while the other as a reporter. To me, O'Brien wants to depict what truly happened, but cannot get directly to the point because as a storyteller he incorporates his feelings, which in this case was about an event that traumatized him and thus could not in his right mind accurately convey the details. But regardless of what is truth and what is fiction, one can undoubtedly see that Tim O'Brien has personal attachments to the story, so much that it is shown by the incorporation of writing techniques of repetition, contradiction, and metafiction.
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