“It Would Have Been a Good Time to Talk”: The Past Perfective Modal and the Difficulty of Telling in “Speaking of Courage”

This essay argues that the extraordinary density of would have + past participle constructions in Tim O’Brien’s “Speaking of Courage” is the formal medium through which The Things They Carried narrates the difficulty of telling a true war story. Drawing on Randolph Quirk’s account of the past perfective modal, this essay shows how O’Brien backshifts Norman Bowker’s imagined future speech into what he would have said, rendering address grammatically unrealized before it can occur. Read alongside “Notes” and the story’s 1976 version, this grammar of unrealized address becomes a mode of metafictional confession, exposing O’Brien’s belated recognition of the ethical responsibility of war writing. The restored shit field joins grammatical nonfulfillment to the material and ethical residues of war. Read within a wider tradition of American war writing, “Speaking of Courage” not only dramatizes a difficulty of address distinct from difficulty of representation but gives that difficulty grammatical form.