Magical Realism in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Fiction

Abstract

Although Tim O’Brien has denied the literary influence of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges and their versions of “magical realism” on his work, he has produced a body of work about the American experience in Vietnam that corresponds closely to what Alejo Carpentier referred to in his preface to his first novel, El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, 1949), as lo real maravilloso americano. This essay argues that O’Brien’s “magical realism” is not the result of a traceable literary heritage; it is, rather, the product of social and political conditions in the United States that began with American political and military hegemony after World War II and continued up to and beyond its defeat in Vietnam. Living with the memory of a war he did not want to fight is difficult enough for O’Brien. It is even more difficult for him to live in a country whose leaders continue to deny American culpability in that war. For O’Brien, the magical and marvelous are more than stylistic tricks; they are his means of not only escaping but also of exposing the reality of a war conducted by those who proclaimed they had to destroy in order to save, who insisted on the “plausibility of denial.”