Sixteen - Good Form

This chapter is very nice, because it sort of explains how this book is written, and why it is written thusly, which is kind of handy for people like me who find literature tricky =D? So after reading this chapter, it seems like everything he has written up to this point is shrouded in a tricky tricky fog of ambiguous half-truth and half-fiction and it's impossible to discern what actually happened and what O'Brien just wants you to think actually happened. But that's okay. Because like O'Brien says "It's not a game" (p. 171). If there is not yet a term for this, I hereby declare it to be a Reverse Metaphor. O'Brien is not prancing about in ambiguity, sewing half truths just for the fun of it, and blending truth and fiction just to confuse us because he wants to be a tricky and evil bane of high school AP Lit students. This is not a game where he makes up stories that happened because he thinks they make him sound cooler. In reality, all of the stories, though not necessarily true, add a new level of understanding that would be impossible for somebody who wasn't actually in Vietnam to understand if he just strictly stuck to the stuff that really happened. Which better explains how O'Brien and the others felt during the war:

what probably happened, "I once saw a guy who almost died once, but then something got in my eye, and I stopped watching."

or what probably didn't happen, "his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present."

Whether it's true or not is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is making us understand what it felt like. O'Brien's goal is not to make us believe with our minds, that can only understand the truth of reality, but to make us believe with our stomachs, which can understand the truth of fiction.

It's tricky to rock a rhyme, but not to understand O'Brien's good form. Word.