TTTC Final Assessment/ Choice 2 Big Fish

A straight out story that tells of factual event after event isn’t true truth. What actually happened versus a version that has been exaggerated might provide the same information, but the emotion behind it and the level that it draws in the listener varies enormously. The novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and the movie Big Fish have similar storytelling techniques that can’t be called lies exactly. The stories aren’t the truth, but they retain the essence of what made the story important enough to repeat. Truth is evaluated in both of these works, and teaches the reader that a fact by fact story can make the recipient overlook what was important about it. The point of both of these works was to show how to tell a good story, and that sometimes the factual story is too small for its contents.

In both The Things They Carried and Big Fish the truth is stretched to become fantastic stories that draw the reader in with wild imagery. For instance in the book O’Brien describes himself in the boat with Elroy at the border between the U.S. and Canada. He sees all the people who he was connected to, or would be in the future and they were all heckling him and he gives in to the draft because he is afraid of the embarrassment if he does not go to Vietnam. “It was if there were an audience to my life, that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself blush. I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yards away, I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted.” (O’Brien 39) Later on he admits that summer that he had never been at the Tip Top Lodge with an old man named Elroy, he was home-playing golf while worrying about the draft. He may never have actually made the move to leave the U.S., but the purpose of the story was to show what he wanted to do and the conflict that had been racing through his mind the entire time. He was terrified of the thought of going to war and killing people, but he was even more afraid of the thought of letting people down and having his reputation ruined. That’s the root of his story, but if he told it for how it happened it wouldn’t have shown how life changing the decision was for him. It would’ve overlooked what was going on internally, and O’Brien just changed his surroundings during that period of his life in order to fit what was happening inside of him. Big Fish has a similar story involving the main character Edward and the town of Spectre right after he left home. He arrives in the town, and everything is so perfect that people no longer wear shoes because they know that they will never leave. This town represented a time in the protagonists life where he knew it was too early in his life to settle down, and that he needed more than what an unknown town could offer him. He turned down the perfect, peaceful community in order to go and experience life that would be a lot more painful that just settling down. He could have even had an internal fear of not living up to his potential, since he had a self proclaimed great ambition. The purpose of the stories in Big Fish were to show how he was a big fish himself, and by telling his stories a life that wouldn’t be as spectacular in truth is made much more grand and helps him live on for eternity. The Things They Carried had a similar purpose in that by writing all of his stories, he gives new life to people that have long since been dead, maybe even giving them a new grace to what their life was. There’s a lot more purpose to a story that had been transformed than a timeline of events can ever have.

There are however, differenced between the storytelling in both of these works. O’Brien changes complete situations and admits that they are false, but in Big Fish Edward’s experiences are stretched but based in a true situation, and he swears that all of them are true. In the chapter titled “The Man I Killed”, he relates his guilt by imagining what the life of this man was like, and that he may not have even wanted to be in the war himself, and an educated person just like the author himself. He says later that he didn’t even kill that man, but the fact that he felt guilty for the deaths of the Vietnamese people remained the same. You can’t trust the root of his story though, his can be something entirely fabricated, you can trust his emotion, but not the events. But if hadn’t put himself in the direct position of guilt, people would have difficulty understanding why he would feel personally responsible. He wanted the reader to understand what the value of life was to him, and how he felt for allowing it to happen. Then in the movie you find out at the end of the movie that Ed’s stories although having a mythical quality to them, were based off of one fact that was stretched to its limits. For example at the funeral you see the various characters, Karl was portrayed as a giant, but in real life he was just abnormally tall, the conjoined twins were not conjoined at all, and you find the other people to actually exist which authenticates the stories to an extent. He chooses to make them like a fantasy story in order to magnify the events that followed. Like he made Karl into a giant that ate everything in his hometown, but the important part was that he was the catalyst for leaving the town because it was too small for either of them. Both kinds of stories have their own value, but the bases of the stories differ greatly.
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Both The Things They Carried and Big Fish tell their stories to draw in the person who’s being subjected to it. They tell their stories in order for people to be carried on, and the importance of the events to be understood in the future. Their stories aren’t lies because they tell a truth truer than what the facts can portray. If Ed had not portrayed his wife as an uncatchable fish, and he had not listed all of the trials he went through to marry her, his pursuit of her wouldn’t be nearly as romantic or seem as hard as it was to him. Or with O’Brien and his story about Maryanne, if he had told it like “A soldier’s girlfriend came to Vietnam, but left him because she thought the Green Berets were better.” it wouldn’t give you any insight on what kind of change people go through because of Vietnam. Sometimes stretching the truth is necessary to show the roots underneath the story itself. They don’t tell the factual truth because it can never go as in depth as a story that’s twisted and shaped into a story that can portray the emotion that is occurring during the event. The narrator’s bias on the world and how they choose to tell their story to the audience in their own way shows the true importance of what had occurred because they are now able to interpret it for themselves; this is what makes the story bigger than what the facts were. When you live it, it’s hard to realize what significance a certain event will play throughout your entire life, but later on you can recognize something that might be symbolic and how it was life changing. In both works, the truth is not what happened, but what they felt as they went through their life, and that gives a better insight for a story than anything else.