SLIGHT OF HAND: A Magician's Handbook to Tim O'Brien's Narrative Mystery. John Engler

SLIGHT OF HAND: A Magician's Handbook to Tim O'Brien's Narrative Mystery John Engler Critical Paper and Program Bibliography Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2011

2 Slight Of Hand: A Magician's Handbook to Tim O'Brien's Narrative Mystery When, as a boy, Tim O Brien taught himself magic tricks, he may have also been teaching himself how to write. In a biography of O Brien, Tobey Herzog describes a young boy who purchased boxed sets of tricks at a local magic shop and performed at junior high convocations, talent shows, and birthday parties where he was paid just enough to acquire more tricks (10). Magic helped O Brien escape his father s alcoholism and, says Timothy Melley in his essay Postmodern Amnesia, gave him an early sense of the creative force: I liked the aloneness of magic, [O Brien] writes, as God and other miracle makers must also like it... I liked shaping the universe around me. I liked the power (200). The ability to mold a vision of the world is the realm of magicians. And of writers. Though he wouldn t have known it, Tim O Brien s writing may have started with his first magic trick. In the magic, his writing took form, not only in terms of the ability to shape the universe, but in the very method of creation and in the effect for the audience. Every magician knows that it s not really about what happens the first time you try a trick or even the tenth, but rather what happens after you ve done it a hundred times or more, what happens when you ve done it so many times that you dream it, that your hands know what you re doing almost before you do. In the repetition is the ultimate act of perfection. To perform in public, O Brien would have had to spend hours and hours practicing and honing and repeating his tricks. He would have developed an affinity for the repetition, a proclivity for it. Though his interest in magic tricks waned late in high

3 school (Herzog 10), his leanings toward repetition seem to have reappeared in his writing, even helped define the unique style for which he has become known. In Going After Cacciato, for example, the platoon encounters the opening to a Vietcong tunnel, and, according to standard operating procedure, the lieutenant orders a soldier to crawl in to clear it of the enemy. The first time readers see this scene, O Brien doesn t so much write out a full description as mention it in passing: When First Lieutenant Sidney Martin persisted in making them search tunnels before blowing them, and after Frenchie Tucker and Bernie Lynn died in the tunnels, the disobedience became fully organized (63). By merely itemizing the moment of Tucker s and Lynn s deaths on a list of reasons for the platoon s subsequent insubordination, O Brien marginalizes the importance of the deaths. Without visual details of the moment, there is no scene laid out for readers to see, and they are left to imagine the death scene themselves, if they think of it at all. Later forty-seven pages later O Brien pens the scene in its awful detail. It s every bit as dreadful as readers might have expected, but the scene is not written in straight chronological fashion. And this is what interests me. Within the first two pages of Chapter 14, O Brien mentions three separate times, not the death of Tucker or Lynn, but the shot that killed Tucker (Cacciato 110-111). At first glance, the three references to the shot seem randomly placed lines 1, 22, and 47 but there is a pattern in O Brien s work, which can be seen in the following table. To read the columns in sequence (left to right) is as the text reads in the book, but to compare the rows is where O Brien s craft begins to appear:

4 What happens before the shot The shot What follows the shot Lines 1-7 Lines 8-40 Lines 45-50 They heard the shot that got Frenchie Tucker... Somebody s got to go down, said First Lieutenant Sidney Martin... But that was later, too. First they waited... It s a war, said Sidney Martin. Is it really?... That s what I tell my folks in letters, Eddie said. A war! They d all heard the shot. They d watched Frenchie go down, a big hairy guy who was scheduled to take the next chopper to the rear... He...told him it was a matter of going down or getting himself courtmartialed... They watched him go down. A big cussing guy who had to wiggle his way in. Then they heard the shot. They waited a long while. Sidney Martin found a flashlight and leaned down into the hole and looked. And then he said, Somebody s got to go down. Figure 1. Narrative chart. Going After Cacciato. Chapter 14 O Brien employs an unorthodox technique here. Revealed in this passage is the story-telling voice of a narrator who doesn t quite seem to know how to tell a story in the expected chronological fashion. This doesn t read as some polished recounting of a wellrehearsed tale told beginning to end in a sequential series of events. Nor is this typical flashback. This is a narrator trying to get the story out, a man apparently so disturbed by the shot that he can t help but keep slipping back to it, stumbling through it, reliving it as though the echo keeps ricocheting around inside his skull. This scene may appear to have little in common with the polish and precision and flawless execution of a magician s performance, but what this reflects is the practice that

5 precedes the performance. Here O Brien captures the essence of the rehearsal, of the process of learning a trick, the over-and-over-again attempts to get it right. How much of this strategy is intentional on the part of O Brien is not entirely clear. The technique can probably be chalked up, in part, to the tendency of postmodern writers to produce a deliberately less-polished text, to reveal some bones of their work, to keep the jagged edges and avoid the smooth veneer, a trend where, as Herzog explains in a piece about O Brien published in Modern Fiction Studies, contemporary fiction writers are preoccupied with the self-exposure of their invention ( True 895). O Brien perhaps intends for the text to expose some of the backstage apparatus which a magician need not disguise during rehearsal. Even if the form is not entirely an intentional move for O Brien, what he certainly did intend is to use this wobbly narrator to convey the nature of a soldier who had seen what this narrator saw, to give priority to what O Brien calls story-truth over happeningtruth, to recreate what the experience would have felt like instead of an historical accounting. Writers who present war stories in some orderly chronological fashion rob readers of what a soldier s tumultuous experience would have felt like. By contrast, says Herzog, in O Brien s work the narrative confusion... heightens readers sense of the chaotic nature of war ( True 911). War is nothing if not chaotic, and O Brien wants readers to feel that. Because his fiction is so much grounded in the reality of his own experiences, the Vietnam vet O Brien wants readers to feel what he felt; I want you to feel what I felt, (qtd. in Herzog True 900) he says when interviewed. In the Cacciato passage, O Brien bookends the three shot-sentences with repetition, twice using sensory description of Tucker squeezing into the hole, and twice

6 including Martin saying somebody s got to go down. The three shot-sentences vary only slightly in their construction, and all three repeat the exact staccato phrase heard the shot. This triple-play is how readers are clued in, however subtly, that the shot not the death is the common and vital thread. What s equally as interesting is how O Brien manages to track the narrative line three times over the same chronological moment. While the first iteration moves forward in time, the second works progressively backward in time, and the third resumes the forward motion again. I ve called this technique scene-recycling to distinguish it from traditional repetition or flashback. Here s another way to map the first half of Chapter 14: Narrative line Chronology of events Threat of court-martial Wiggled down the hole The shot Waiting It s a war. Got flashlight and leaned down Somebody s got to go down. Figure 2. Narrative map. Going After Cacciato. Chapter 14 Following this narrative zigzag, the chapter ends within a page and a half with a description of Bernie Lynn going down the hole after Tucker, and he is immediately shot a half inch below the throat (113) before he can be dragged by the feet out of the hole, dead as Tucker.

7 These are potent scenes, and I do not take the violence depicted here lightly. The scene could have been written in a clean, organized, documentary-style description. It could have been captured as an historical account, a sequence of events. But had this scene been played in a straight-line-chronology, it would not, despite its violence, have created the as-true-to-life-as-possible experience O Brien wants to offer readers. He is after something other than documenting history. He is after the hearts of his readers. He knows, says John Timmerman in Art of the True War Story, that what happened in the hearts and minds of the soldiers who fought that battle is not conveyed by clinical data. To uncover that is the task of fiction. This is precisely the task that Tim O'Brien undertakes (101). O Brien uses a narrator as frail and shaken as any human would be who witnessed such a shot. Though readers certainly do not enjoy the violence, they can deeply appreciate how O Brien has brought authenticity to the experience, how he concerns himself not only with getting the details of the story told, but how his story affects them. This instance of a scene recycling in Cacciato turns out not to be O Brien s last. In fact, his use of the strategy only grows and develops and evolves over time as he experiments with its deployment in the 1990 book The Things They Carried and later in the 1994 mystery In the Lake of the Woods. When O Brien begins the story of another Vietnam platoon in The Things They Carried, he mentions a soldier being killed on page 2, and the killing is referred to twice more on page 3. In all three cases, the death is mentioned in passing, just as in Cacciato. Death is again subordinated to emotionless, list-like passages:

8 Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head (2); Until his was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of dope, which for him was a necessity (3); and each carried a green plastic poncho that... weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up (3). This dispassionate introduction to killing draws readers into the mindset of a soldier who has hardened himself to deal with the tragedy. Three pages later a full scene of the killing is laid out, opening in similar list-like fashion: Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition... (6), and then, as though in a flash of memory, O Brien drops in a description of the death: He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something just boom, then down not like the movie where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat... fell. Boom. Down, There was nothing else. (6) A half page later at the end of the paragraph, Kiowa is heard again describing how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down, he said. Like cement (7). Already, barely seven pages into the book, repetition is in full swing: who

9 was scared twice, that he was shot three times, gear he carried listed four times, that he fell motionless in two separate parts of a paragraph but with no fewer than ten discrete descriptions dead weight, no twitching or flopping, like watching rock fall, a big sandbag, just boom, then down, just flat... fell, Boom. Down, dropped like so much concrete, boom-down, and Like cement (6-7). This goes beyond the typical use of repetition, beyond a poetic repeating of a phrase for the sake of rhythm. Some might call it overkill. And all this in a chapter where by the middle of page seven, the word carried has already been repeated 31 times. This story is simply oozing repetition. For readers who get weary of the repetition, they might appreciate that even the characters tire of it. Ten pages after Lavender s death, we hear Kiowa yet again talking about it, this time to Norman Bowker: Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God boom, down. Not a word. I ve heard this. Still zipping himself up. Zapped while pissing. Alright, fine. That s enough. Yeah, but you had to see it. The guy just I heard man. Cement. So why not shut... up? (Things 17). Despite the ardent plea from Bowker, you get the idea that O Brien is not about to let this go any more than Kiowa. On the page after Lavender s killing, his death is already being appropriated for practical literary purposes as a time-keeping device: In the first week of April, before Ted Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross received a good luck charm from Martha. It

10 was a simple pebble (Things 8). Then again two pages later: Before Ted Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon, and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and climb in headfirst (10). Readers are not likely to balk at this practical application of Lavender s death because they recognize that everyone, at least on occasion, measures time by the death of a loved one and in death-ridden war even more so. Capitalizing on this knowledge of human nature, O Brien uses the chance to keep the moment of Lavender s death from slipping away too quickly. He reuses Ted Lavender s full name each time because this is how readers have come to know him. It s a way of memorializing his life, a reminder that he did live. The repetition of that full name every couple of pages tends to keep the death fresh in one s memory, as it would have been for Lavender s comrades. It matters to O Brien that readers experience not only the death, but the extended aftermath of the death the sorrow, the memories, the lingering anguish and heartache. What readers don t immediately know is that both events referred to in the chronological milestones (the good-luck pebble and the 17 th man) are not only relevant to Lavender s death, but are the very cause of it. Readers eventually find out that while the other members of the platoon were gathered around a Vietcong tunnel waiting for Lee Strunk, who had drawn number 17, to come out, Lavender had wandered off alone to pee (11). Readers are also clued in about how Lieutenant Cross had not noticed Lavender wandering off because he was distracted by Martha s good-luck pebble in his mouth, daydreaming about it being her tongue (12). A moving-backward-in-time structure allows for a delayed revelation, which creates intrigue, but perhaps more importantly, the

11 repetition attunes attentive readers to what s been happening and why and where the vital clues reside. The death of Lavender results in at least two incidents: 1) Cross immediately takes his platoon to a nearby village and burns it to the ground, and 2) Cross suffers a breakdown presumably out of guilt, in part for burning the village but more for the blame he lays on himself for Lavender s death: he had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and that was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war (Things 16). This guilt he shoulders becomes central to the story. To map this section of Things is to reveal a startlingly similar narrative structure to Cacciato, despite this section spanning several days and twenty-five pages as compared to a few minutes and two pages: Narrative line Chronology of events Cross has Martha s pebble Lavender pees The body drops Body is taken away Men joke around Cross has new resolve Strunk draws number 17 Lavender is shot Body is wrapped They burn the village Cross burns letters/photos Figure 3. Narrative map. The Things They Carried.

12 As in Cacciato, O Brien starts in media res with an unsettling incident, moves a bit into the future, then moves backwards in time, and finally moves forward through to the end of the story. Also, both maps reveal that a single event is repeated three times, the event that is presumably the event of most impact. The repeated event in Things is not the kill shot as it is in Cacciato, but the falling of the dead body. Where in Cacciato the body was out of sight at the moment of death, in Things Kiowa sees it fall. More than the report of the shot echoing through the jungle, the sight of a body alive one moment and the next a sandbag is, suggests the structure, a more stunning moment for the narrator. Two-thirds of the way into the chapter, Lavender s death has been invoked more than a half dozen times, and yet there are two more instances to come. O Brien uses these final instances to contrast the way Cross deals with the death as compared to his men. The platoon is depicted telling jokes and using hard language (20), recalling how they were waiting for Lavender s chopper, smoking the dead man s dope (20), commenting that because of the tranquilizers he took he wouldn t have felt a thing (20), and joking that the moral of the story was to stay away from drugs. They ll ruin your day every time (20). To cope, the soldiers use humor as a defense against the pain. They react the way they ve been conditioned to react to death in war by closing themselves to the hurt. Cross, on the other hand, deals with the death by letting in the pain. His confidence is shattered, and he breaks down. The fairly extended scene opens with the lieutenant alone; he crouched in the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha s letters (Things 23). Cross knows the futility of it: you couldn t burn the blame (23), he acknowledges, but he knows he has to do something. The next morning, we re still in scene with Cross, and he wakes determined to dispose of his good-luck pebble (25) and

13 determined to perform his duties firmly and without negligence (25). Again he recognizes that it wouldn t help Lavender (25), but still he resolves to comport himself as an officer (25). Cross uses the death of Lavender to shape up. To cope, he redoubles his commitment to focus, order, and discipline, not an unreasonable way to deal with a platoon that has, as a result of Lavender s death, become more cynical and slack. Recycling the death of Lavender certainly adds complexity to what might otherwise be a straight-line narrative. It also helps avoid oversimplification of the trauma. Recycling makes the death present again and again. It reminds readers why the death occurred and what the death leads to, reminds them that the death really matters. With each mention, the story is re-intensified, and readers are asked to share in the lasting anguish. Because O Brien intends to tell true war stories true as in this-is-what-it-feltlike then not only does scene recycling serve him well, it becomes core to the very success of the story itself and core to O Brien s objective to get readers to feel the story. Things contains several additional instances of scene recycling Curt Lemon blown into a tree by a land mine, a boy killed and left with no jaw, Kiowa dead and sunk in a field of muck, the Spin chapter and these could each be examined in more detail. Suffice it to say that Things certainly contains a more developed use of scene recycling than Cacciato. But if O Brien was satisfied with the effect of the expanded technique in Things, he wasn t done experimenting. In the mystery story, In the Lake of the Woods, O Brien not only employs extensive scene recycling, he builds the entire structure of the book on the technique.

14 In similar fashion to Cacciato and Things, the narrative line of Lake picks up in the middle of the chronology with a traumatic event. The morning after John and Kathy Wade arrive at a lake cabin, a retreat for the couple to nurse John s loss in a highlycontested race for a seat in the U.S. Senate, Kathy goes missing without a trace. From there, the narrative line moves both forward and backward as a way to explore what might have happened to Kathy forward to scenes of John and his neighbors and the sheriff searching for her, backward to scenes of John s life growing up, his time in the Vietnam war, his life with Kathy, and his career as a politician. Where the model from Cacciato and Things demonstrates how the narrative line turns once backward and then a second time forward, the line in Lake is more complex. Melley describes the tangled nature of the text: O'Brien enmeshes the distinct traumas of John Wade's life until each seems both a cause of the next and a result of the former (118). Part of the snarl results from a surprising number of chronological turns. In Cacciato and Things, two turns was certainly manageable. So what s the limit for a booklength work? How many turns is too many before losing readers? Eight? Twelve? Eighteen? By my count, the narrative line in Lake changes direction no fewer than twentynine times. In Chapter 10 alone, for example, the narrative line moves into the past and then further into the past, rebounds forward in time, and then, before coming fully to present, returns deeper into the past again and, in this particular case, rebounds back and forth five more times before returning to the present. This story moves backward and forward as if that were the most natural thing to do, as if stories had always been written with such substantial chronological redirection.

15 O Brien works to mitigate the substantial movement by using four distinctive kinds of chapter divisions. All of the chapters from the past are given titles like: The Nature of Loss, The Nature of Marriage, and The Nature of Love. Similarly, the present-day narrative chapters are consistently titled, given the journalist s standard questions: How Unhappy They Were, What He Remembered, and Where They Looked. There are two other kinds of present-day chapters: Hypothesis chapters which propose a variety of explanations for Kathy s disappearance and Evidence chapters which each contain a collection of quotes gathered by the narrator after Kathy s disappearance, quotes from a variety of sources those interviewed about the couple s relationship, books of a wide variety, and transcripts from John s fictional court-martial mingled with the actual transcripts from the My Lai trial. Some of the quotes are authentic, some contrived. To add to the complex structure, the narrator himself is elusive a reporter who reveals himself mostly in footnotes. But once readers catch on to the overall pattern, they are more easily able to locate themselves in the narrative and in the chronology. Even with the tight chapter organization, why would O Brien risk losing readers in such prolific time shifts? Why not move into the past in a single flashback, cover the territory, and then return to the present and move forward? What s the payoff? When I mapped out the book, some possibilities began to appear. As I experimented with different ways to map the 36 plot points I had identified, I began to recognize the cyclical nature of the story, how it seems to be going around and around again, rehashing many of the same scenes not just the three times of Cacciato and Things, but five, six, seven, even eight times. This is not the first time for O Brien to use such an annular strategy. The

16 Spin chapter of Things, explains Dr. Robin Blyn in an analysis published in Explicator, reveals the circular repetition and reenactments of a traumatic memory (190). As such, the structure of Spin is not only intentional, it s put to use by O Brien to emphasize the very purpose of the piece: to explore the traumatized mind. If this is O Brien s modus operandi in Things, I began to suspect it might be visible in Lake also. To see the structure more clearly, I created a spiral narrative map of Lake (Fig. 4). Not only does this allow for all the plot points to fit on a single page, it also captures the book s cyclical nature visually. To develop the map, I had to make certain judgment calls. For example, there are several passages in the book that depict scenes from the married life of the Wades, but since there are few textual clues about exactly when these moments occur in time, I placed them all together. For reasons that will become apparent, I decided to start the spiral at the center and work outward. I also had to decide what to do with the Evidence chapters. They are not part of the narrative chronology exactly. Though the quotes they contain often refer to moments throughout John s life, as a collection, they were ostensibly compiled post-narrative, so I ve chosen to represent them as the final chronological moment. I ve numbered the arrival at the lake as point 0 with points progressing into the past with increasingly negative numbers and points moving forward with progressively positive numbers. While other variations of this map could be drawn, this one seems as representative as any. The map helps confirm not only the number of changes in chronology, but how and where they occur in the narrative line. There is little regularity in the shifts, nor does the redirection come at standard intervals or cover similar amounts of material or time. The most frequently recycled scenes from the past are repeated five or more times. It

17 should be noted, says psychologist Judith Lewis Herman, that this kind of repetitive compulsiveness is not uncommon for trauma victims who tend to relive the event as -15) Kills a man point blank -14) Thuan Yen massacre -13) Kills Weatherby -16) Nicknamed Sorcerer -17) Goes to war -18) Father dies -19) Meets, spies on Kathy -20) Childhood magic tricks 15) Evidence 14) Runs away to Canada 13) Searches lake with neighbor 12) Goes on a long walk 11) Kathy s sister arrives 10) The search continues 9) Sheriff conducts interviews -12) Is wounded 8) Sheriff arrives -11) Edits documents about massacre -10) Arrives home from war -9) Dates Kathy in college -8) Gets married -7) Elected to state senate -6) Married life with Kathy -5) Elected Lt. Governor -4) Kathy has abortion -3) US Senate campaign -2) Revelation of massacre -1) Loses senate election 0) Arrive at 1) Spend time at cabin 2) Makes tea, kills plants 7) Visits the neighbors 6) Begins searching, no boat found 5) Cleans house 4) Slept in, Kathy not in bed 3) Hypothesis Kathy goes missing Figure 4. Spiral narrative map. In the Lake of the Woods. though it were continually recurring in the present (qtd. in Melley 108). That these scenes are rehashed again and again only confirms that O Brien wants to get at the traumatized mind, and that he, to a large degree, understands its nature and seeks to capture it for readers to experience. To what degree O Brien deliberately repeated these scenes may never be

18 known he talks about how writing is like entering a swirl of memories, how after the memory circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets (Herzog 909-10). If these repeated scenes sprang from the swirling memories of a traumatized mind, it might be temping to write them off as mere neurosis. Traumatic though they may be, they seem to also be evidence of the mind trying to process the moment, to understand, to see more plainly. Creative writing professor Robin Silbergleid suggests in a piece published in Contemporary Literature that with each version of the narrative, O Brien strives to clarify the experience (150) for both himself and his readers. If this is true also of Lake, if the repetition is meant to afford clarity, then the repetition cannot be entirely accidental or neurotic. It must instead be part of O Brien s intent, the method he chooses to employ as a means to an end. Although O Brien uses Kathy s disappearance as the center of the narrative mystery, he does not bring clarity to this mystery. This should be no surprise. Not only does O Brien not write tidy endings, his method precludes them. Blyn explains that instead of resolving the tragedy, O Brien delivers the ambiguous, the unfinished, and the wound that will not succumb to the narrative cure. Keeping the wound open, O Brien s text prevents the neat closure and false redemption of the traditional war story (191). While the mystery of Kathy s disappearance may drive the narrative forward, the structure of the book suggests that this mystery is not what the book is about. The story spins outward, toward uncertainty and away from easy answers. The structure itself suggests a more subtle, but more universal mystery than the disappearance of a single person.

19 The four most-recycled scenes from the past work together to heighten the narrative mystery and simultaneously to point to the core mystery of the story. The scenes of -20) Childhood magic tricks establish John as someone well-versed in trickery and making things disappear and as someone who uses magic as an emotional crutch of sorts to cope with a father s death (perhaps not unlike O Brien s own escape into magic). Readers might deduce that these memories point to John, who was called Sorcerer by his platoon mates, being capable of making Kathy disappear. As a counterpoint, -6) Scenes from married life with Kathy demonstrates that while John may have been a little obsessed with Kathy, the two of them were deeply in love, leaving readers to conclude that John would not have harmed Kathy. These two plot points raise awareness about John s character, and while the two tend to offset each other in terms of a conclusion about John s involvement in Kathy s disappearance, both point to emotional scarring John has experienced. As yet another counterpoint, the pairing of the oft-repeated scenes of -13) Kills Weatherby and -14) Thuan Yen massacre, which are adjacent in the chronology and for these purposes function as a single traumatic catalyst, reveals a heightened instability of the mind. These horrific memories haunt John incessantly. They represent the trauma of a war-ravaged soldier, not so much physically wounded as emotionally maimed. In the final flashback of the book, -11) Edits documents at desk job, a singleinstance scene, readers are clued in to the full extent of John s capacity for deception with his attempt to remove the documented evidence of his participation in the Thuan Yen massacre. It s then that readers learn that the present-day public revelation of his involvement in the massacre and subsequent deception cost him the senate race. Though

20 years in his past, the war has continued to plague him. Any veneer of mental stability is stripped away and readers are left unable to determine with any certainty whether John killed Kathy, whether she left him, whether she is alive or dead. O Brien uses these four recycled scenes punctuated with this startling revelation as a way to explore the human mind. Silberglied explains that these retellings also reveal the moral and psychological work that storytelling can do (151). When O Brien draws up the possible hypotheses for Kathy s disappearance, readers are inclined to see any of them as real possibilities because he has established the groundwork that makes any of them feasible. Because of the recycled scenes, there is support enough to make a case for each of the hypotheses, support both in terms of physical evidence and in terms of John s behavior. O Brien intends for readers to be left wondering. The two plot points recycled in the present are the 3) Hypothesis and 15) Evidence chapters. Curiously, each iteration is unique. The chapters do not replay the same scenes as in the previous examples of recycling. Instead, each chapter explores a new narrative region as if knocking along a paneled wall, listening for the echo that belies a secret passageway. And while these chapters don t necessarily bring clarity to the narrative mystery, the recycling gives O Brien a chance to further probe the core mystery. Notably, each instance of the Hypothesis and Evidence chapters is titled identically; there is no titular distinguishing between the different hypotheses nor between the various collections of evidence. Each hypothesis carries equal weight, each collection of evidence is as valuable as the next, interchangeable duplicates, layer upon layer of repetition and weight and significance.

21 As in Things, O Brien uses recycling in Lake both to explore the past and set up how the past shapes the present. The spiral map can be used to see the relationship of the recycled past-day scenes and present-day scenes, and how they connect at the core of the story. In this final iteration of the map (Fig. 5), the recycled scenes have been connected with arrows. Since the scenes from the past occur in the somewhat earlier narrative (nearer the center of the map), I have drawn those arrows pointing toward the center, and since the scenes from the present occur later in the narrative (nearer the outside of the circle), I have drawn those arrows pointing outward. The core is the shared juncture. -15) Kills a man point blank -14) Thuan Yen massacre -13) Kills Weatherby -16) Nicknamed Sorcerer -17) Goes to war -18) Father dies -19) Meets, spies on Kathy -20) Childhood magic tricks 15) Evidence 14) Runs away to Canada 13) Searches lake with neighbor 12) Goes on a long walk 11) Kathy s sister arrives 10) The search continues 9) Sheriff conducts interviews -12) Is wounded 8) Sheriff arrives -11) Edits documents about massacre -10) Arrives home from war -9) Dates Kathy in college -8) Gets married -7) Elected to state senate -6) Married life with Kathy -5) Elected Lt. Governor -4) Kathy has abortion -3) US Senate campaign -2) Revelation of massacre -1) Loses senate election 0) Arrive at 1) Spend time at cabin 2) Makes tea, kills plants 7) Visits the neighbors 6) Begins searching, no boat found 5) Cleans house 4) Slept in, Kathy not in bed 3) Hypothesis Kathy goes missing Figure 5. Spiral narrative map with recycled scenes connected. In the Lake of the Woods.

22 The past points to the core, and the core points to the future. What is at the core is the mystery that O Brien seeks to understand the thing around which the entirety of the story spins, the thing which he wants readers to feel. Timmerman, speaking of O Brien s technique in two of his short stories, explains how his stories are roughly circular, replaying events, lurching into indecision, in an effort to get the true story woven into a whole (107). The narrative of Lake is also circular and the repetition likewise gives O Brien the chance to recycle vital scenes as a way to get at the true story. The core of mystery of O Brien s In the Lake of the Woods is nothing less than the traumatized mind of John Wade. The entirety of the story hinges on the collective traumas of John s life. John s past has made him who he is. Who he is determines what he does. The story is the product of the mind of John, the corroboration of who he is, who he has become. The recycling is used not only to bring the emotional core of a character into sharp relief, but to speculate what behavior will result from that emotional core. O Brien is willing to risk fracturing the narrative line with so many time shifts because the narrative line is far less important than exploring the mental state of John Wade. This psychological digging is not merely some artful indulgence, it is the precise reason for the recycling of scenes, the whole thrust of the book. The story may at first appear to be about a politician who loses an election or about a married man who loses his wife, but that is slight of hand by a skilled magician. Behind the narrative mystery is a greater mystery the mystery of a traumatized man s mind. O Brien has built a narrative that captures the mental state of a troubled man as well as the experience of a narrator trying to understand that troubled mind. Careful

23 readers come to realize that it s a war story: what war does to a man, how it lurks, how it haunts. Speaking about Things, Silbergleid suggests that by the collection s compulsive retelling and rewriting of particular narratives, the book as a whole is largely about the problem of representing the veteran s experience of Vietnam (150). The same might be said for Lake. The recycling is the narrator s way of getting at material that doesn t (and shouldn t) come easy, material that gnaws at the mind of veterans and complicates their lives in unpredictable and often tragic ways. If O Brien s stories are meant to capture story-truth, then it can be concluded that In the Lake of the Woods is not at all a story about the disappearance of a woman but instead a story about the confusion, frustration, fear, and chaos that surround the veterans of modern-day society. The plot is meant primarily to evoke the feelings of what our veterans experience: that despite their attempts to return to civilian life, to become productive and contributing members of society, they ultimately may not be able to escape the past. It is not a story that any of us want to hear the story that war will haunt our vets indefinitely, that the rest of us may have great difficulty in understanding them, that unless we change our ways perhaps their best option is to get into the proverbial boat, cross the proverbial border, and make themselves disappear. Just like John Wade.

24 Works Cited Blyn, Robin. O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Explicator 61.3 (2003): 189. Print. Herzog, Tobey C. Tim O Brien. New York: Twayne, 1997. Print. ---. Tim O Brien s True Lies. Modern Fiction Studies 46.4 (2000): 893. Print. Melley, Timothy. Postmodern Amnesia: Trauma and Forgetting in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. Contemporary Literature 44.1 (2003): 106. Print. O Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. New York: Dell, 1978. Print. ---. In the Lake of the Woods: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. Print. ---. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990. Print. Silbergleid, Robin. "Making Things Present: Tim O Brien s Autobiographical Metafiction." Contemporary Literature 50.1 (2009): 129. Print. Timmerman, John H. Tim O'Brien and the Art of the True War Story: Night March and Speaking of Courage. Twentieth Century Literature 46.1 (2000): 100. Print.