Why Is Tim O Brien Considered A Metafiction

Tim O’Brien is the author of the fictional novel The Things They Carried. In this Novel O’Brien writes about different stories that relate back to the Vietnam War. The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is book written by Dai Sijie about the communist rule over China. In these novels we see each of the novels are fiction novels even though they both are related to true stories. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as: “…fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. . .” In this pair of books the narrator takes on not only the role

The way Dai Siji writes Balzac is completely different in the way his novel is set up. The narrator actually breaks the story down into three different parts. One of the main reasons that O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried is a piece of metafiction is because he breaks down the wall between novel and reader. By breaking down this wall he is directly address the reader. We repeatedly see this throughout the entire novel. This form of metafiction is scene more in O’Brien’s TTTC rather than in Balzac. “Right here, now, as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trailer near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough” (O’Brien 120). We also see O’Brien directly directing the reader in “The Things They Carried”. In short story “The Things They Carried” O’Brien says, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing things men have always