Making the Lie True: Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Truth as Performance

Abstract

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the story “How to Tell a True War Story” grapples with the nature of truth in fi ction. O’Brien (both the author and the character) claims that truth is found not in the happening truth—the historically accurate facts—but instead in the story truth—the emotionally resonant telling that “makes the stomach believe” (78). In an aesthetic reading of the short story collection, critic Robin Silbergleid argues that the apparent autobiographical form the novel takes directly refl ects O’Brien’s statements about the nature of truth as performative and ultimately unknowable. She concludes,