The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.
Context
As we read The Things They Carried, we will explore how perspective alters and skews truth in order to achieve the author’s overarching goal of “making things present,” to have readers feel on a deeper level what the main character is feeling, and ultimately for readers “to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is considered by many to be a masterpiece. It promises to tell a war story and then draws the reader into the experiences of the characters with which he peoples his novel. He tells their story so well that one is led to believe that he has known these men personally and has reported events accurately and with vivid detail. Then the reader is confronted with the narrator’s admission that he has made the stories up and that the story-truth is often more real than happening-truth. Furthermore, he names his narrator Tim O’Brien, even though those who have met him say that Tim the narrator is not really Tim the author.
Some have said that instead of being a novel, this is a series of short stories held together by a common setting and the basic premise that telling the story of life experience keeps both the happening and the people alive. Furthermore, these stories can release in the person telling the story the tension of bottled-up conflict, anger, and grief. Actually, as the narrator states, stories can save lives. Certainly they can maintain one’s sanity after experiencing trauma which one has difficulty understanding.
Vietnam has always been an enigma to the American people, and the returning soldier often met rejection and even open hostility from those who could not understand why young men were willing to go fight in a war that only remotely affected things in the United States. O’Brien’s book, though neither a justification nor a condemnation of our nation’s action, shows graphically what it was like to struggle with being involved. It also shows how different such warfare was from any that our armed services had been engaged in before, for the enemy was hard to distinguish from the civilian, and combat did not consist of what one thinks of when hearing the word battle. For the person that has many questions about the Vietnam War for anyone interested in being intimately involved with the experience of combat, this is a fascinating book worthy of more than a cursory reading. One needs to reread the stories, taking in not only the physical details but also the deep emotional experience of seeing friends killed, of actually taking the life of another human being, and of being alive after one has seen others die suddenly.
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is considered by many to be a masterpiece. It promises to tell a war story and then draws the reader into the experiences of the characters with which he peoples his novel. He tells their story so well that one is led to believe that he has known these men personally and has reported events accurately and with vivid detail. Then the reader is confronted with the narrator’s admission that he has made the stories up and that the story-truth is often more real than happening-truth. Furthermore, he names his narrator Tim O’Brien, even though those who have met him say that Tim the narrator is not really Tim the author.
Some have said that instead of being a novel, this is a series of short stories held together by a common setting and the basic premise that telling the story of life experience keeps both the happening and the people alive. Furthermore, these stories can release in the person telling the story the tension of bottled-up conflict, anger, and grief. Actually, as the narrator states, stories can save lives. Certainly they can maintain one’s sanity after experiencing trauma which one has difficulty understanding.
Vietnam has always been an enigma to the American people, and the returning soldier often met rejection and even open hostility from those who could not understand why young men were willing to go fight in a war that only remotely affected things in the United States. O’Brien’s book, though neither a justification nor a condemnation of our nation’s action, shows graphically what it was like to struggle with being involved. It also shows how different such warfare was from any that our armed services had been engaged in before, for the enemy was hard to distinguish from the civilian, and combat did not consist of what one thinks of when hearing the word battle. For the person that has many questions about the Vietnam War for anyone interested in being intimately involved with the experience of combat, this is a fascinating book worthy of more than a cursory reading. One needs to reread the stories, taking in not only the physical details but also the deep emotional experience of seeing friends killed, of actually taking the life of another human being, and of being alive after one has seen others die suddenly.
Reading Assignments |
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Related Material
'The Things They Carried,' 20 Years On
In war, there are no winners. That's what readers take away from Tim O'Brien's book about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, in the 20 years since its publication. O'Brien shares what he carries from his time in Vietnam.
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