The narrative style of TTTC is conducive to metafiction because the chapters are not chronological, highly ambiguous and have abrupt shifts in narrator from chapter to chapter. Stories about Curt Lemon's death and the man O'Brien killed could easily be neatly packed into one chapter that answers all of the readers questions, but O'Brien intentionally spreads the information throughout the novel and forces the reader to do the dirty work in piecing together events, because he doesn't want to neatly package these events. He is refusing to give the reader a cohesive, black and white account of these events because he wants his audience to infer their own truths, not accept his.
The narrator also shifts several times from Tim O'Brien to the other members of Alpha Company, and even at one point, to the Vietnamese soldier that O'Brien "killed". O'Brien questions the reliability of every narrator in the story, including himself, while still maintaining that their accounts are all true, because whether or not these narrators are being factual is irrelevant. By introducing so many unreliable narrators, O'Brien is yet again challenging the notion of truth and forcing the readers to figure it out for themselves.
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