Notes

Alfred North Whitehead once said that "There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil". Tim O'Brien, in his novel of life, war, and truth, often tells half truths in his story, adding in own cognizance in order to make a whole story. At times, his novel seems unreal, and at other times... too real altogether, there are rarely any grays in this style and perception and often readers will be left grasping for a rare lifeline. One of these obscure "lifelines" is found in the depths of "Notes", where O'Brien bout with himself over Kiowa and Bowker's lives and deaths becomes exceedingly real.

Although "Notes" is the second of three sequential stories related to Kiowa's death, it is more about Tim's own search for peace within himself through storytelling than about the death itself. Tim, in "Notes", focuses on the guilt that he feels not over Kiowa's death but over his own endeavors to represent it incredibly. His conclusion that most of his writings come from his "simple need to talk" elaborates that his writing is his choice of relief from mental anxiety. As so, his success in dealing with his anguish is directly related to his success as a scribe. Alas, relief is not so easily earned. While Tim knows that telling Bowker's story will simplify his own grief abrogation, he struggles to find an apt venue for doing so.

By working on this story and engineering it in order to make it accurately express his feelings about Vietnam and specifically about Kiowa and Bowker, Tim allows them to greater merge with the story. For Tim, "It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years [he's] avoided thinking about his death and [his] own complicity in it. Even here it's not easy. In the interests of truth, however, [he] wants to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible to what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor.