The Things They Carried by Tim O`Brien
- Pages: 8
- Word count: 1917
- Category: Literature The Things They Carried
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Order NowTim O’Brien is probably the best known and most acclaimed novelist of the Vietnam War OâBrienâs mastery of the short story can be seen best in The Things They Carried. He uses this short-story collection/novel as an occasion to reprise and extend some of his deepest themes and to comment on the purpose and art of fiction. Writing with considerable humor and sympathy, OâBrien offers his stories as a kind of history of the war because âstory-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truthâ (203); as OâBrien remarks in one of his commentary chapters, âWhat stories can do, I guess, is make things presentâ (204). âThe Things They Carriedâ it is a moving narrative about the physical, emotional, and psychological burdens a soldier must bear. Part story (it has characters, a setting, and something of a plot), part military training manual, and part hardware list, the story investigates the âweightâ of the different âtangiblesâ and âintangiblesâ the soldiers âhump,â or carry. They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carriedâ (9). The true weight of the things they carry is the purpose for which they were designed: to kill other people.
The Things They Carried was OâBrienâs fifth book, and though a number of his previous works had garnered favorable reviewsâGoing After Cacciato is widely regarded as a classicâthis collection of stories/chapters attracted a new level of critical attention and acclaim. The eighteen tales contained in The Things They Carried range from stories of robust size to short anecdotes. All of the stories are narrated by a character named Tim OâBrien, an alter-ego of the author who has been fictionalized to an uncertain degree. The stories are interrelated, for they describe the experiences of the members of a single platoon before, during, and after the war.
In several instances the stories, served up without regard to chronology, contradict information provided in other parts of the narrative. ââAs a reader makes his or her way through the book and gradually finds the same stories being retold with new facts and from a new perspective,ââ wrote Steven Kaplan in Understanding Tim OâBrien, ââit begins to become apparent that there is no such thing for OâBrien as the full and exact truth.ââ Robert R. Harris (1990) commented on this aspect of the collection as well: ââAre these [multiple versions of events] simply tricks in the service of making good stories? Hardly. Mr. OâBrien strives to get beyond literal descriptions of what these men went through and what they felt. He makes sense of the unreality of the warâmakes sense of why he has distorted the unreality even further in his fictionâby turning back to explore the workings of the imagination, by probing his memory of the terror and fearlessly confronting the way he has dealt with it as both soldier and fiction writerââ (45).
The Things They Carried quickly came to be regarded by many critics as a seminal work about the American experience in Vietnam. Los Angeles Times reviewer Richard Eder (1990) wrote that ââthe best of these storiesâand none is written with less than the sharp edge of a honed visionâare memory as prophecyââ (12). Peter S. Prescott (1990) of Newsweek concurred, proclaiming that ââhalf a dozen of these storiesâthe longer onesâare simply marvelous. Wars seldom produce good short stories, but two or three of these seem as good as any short stories written about any warââ(17). New York Times Book Review contributor Robert R. Harris observed that ââby moving beyond the horror of the fighting to examine with sensitivity and insight the nature of courage and fear, by questioning the role that imagination plays in helping to form our memories and our own versions of truth, he places The Things They Carried high up on the list of best fiction about any warââ(45).
Although the collection as a whole was widely hailed, several stories in TheThings They Carried garnered particular attention. The title story lists the myriad items that soldiers carry into battle, ranging from the common (cigarettes, machine guns, canned peaches) to the personal (love letters, comic books). The latter items are totems of sorts, keepsakes from their lives back in America. As Harris commented, though, the story is really about the emotions that the soldiers carry with them: grief, terror, love, longing, and regret.
In reviewing the eighteen stories that comprise The Things They Carried, Kaplan (1994) observed that the book ââis OâBrienâs expression of his love of storytelling as an act that can wrestle tolerable and meaningful truths from even the most horrible eventsââ(43). Booklist critic John Mort (1994) called it a ââcompassionate, complex, magnificent novel of self-acceptance and renewalââ (34). Certainly it solidified OâBrienâs reputation as one of Americaâs most talented and honest writers on the war in Vietnam. For his part, OâBrien termed The Things They Carried an antiwar book. He explained to Publishers Weekly that ââmy hope is that when you finish the last page of this book, or any book, there is a sense of having experienced a whole life or a constellation of lives; that something has been preserved which, if the book hadnât been written, would have been lost, like most lives are.ââ
If the tangibles burden the soldiers, the intangibles press down upon them even more: âThey carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longingâthese were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weightâ (20). Ted Lavender, a soldier who is shot in the head after urinating, carried the standard gear, plus tranquilizers and marijuana to help ease âthe unweighed fearâ of being maimed or killed. As the narrator remarks, âThey all carried ghostsâ (10); not only do they remember their comrades who have died, but they carry fear of the elusive Viet Cong who lurk somewhere in the jungle, out of sight, ghostlike. Amid all the violence and death, âthey carried their own livesâ (15). As in many of his works, OâBrien also examines what keeps soldiers fighting even whenâas was often the case in Vietnamâthey did not understand the reasons for the war: âThey carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all. ⊠Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not toâ (20â21). According to OâBrien, the weight of family and country, obligation and honor, and the fear of being labeled a coward press down upon the men. It is a weight so heavy they risk their own lives and destroy others to ease the strain. By blending long lists with characters and moments of action, OâBrien creates a powerful story that makes present for us the terrible burdens we ask soldiers to carry on our behalf.
âThe Things They Carryâ also examines the senselessness and pointlessness of the Vietnam War. When Ted Lavender gets âzapped while zipping,â Lt. Jimmy Cross blames himself. Freighted with âthe responsibility for the lives of his menâ (19), Cross believes that because he continually thinks about Martha, a girl he knows back in the States, he failed to secure the perimeter and thus exposed his men to danger: âHe had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now deadâ (16). Despite his self-recriminations, there is no evidence that Cross did anything wrong; a sniper picked a target and fired, and there was nothing any of them could have done. In retaliation for Lavenderâs death, however, the squad destroys the nearby village of Than Khe: âThey burned everything. They shot chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery and watched the wreckageâ (16).
They never capture or kill the sniper; their vengeance is a hollow act that harms the lives of non-combatants trapped between the warring sides. The senseless destruction of the village fits into the larger pattern of pointlessness that the men participate in: âBy daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lostâ (15). Neither the war nor the soldiersâ actions make military or ethical sense. OâBrien, a writer with a keen sense of irony, sums up the meaninglessness in the standard, existential grunt phrase âthere it isâ: when the squad comes upon a dead VC, one says, âthereâs a definite moral hereâ (13); after debating back and forth, another concludes, âYeah, well ⊠I donât see no moral.â The first responds, âThere it is, man.â There is no morality at work here, only death.â
OâBrien is not so much concerned with bringing the terrible fact of veteran suicide to our attention as he is with dramatizing the weight of ghosts upon oneâs memory and with contemplating the power of stories. OâBrien mulls over the profound claim for the power of stories in the last piece in the collection, the brilliantly titled âThe Lives of the Dead.â Throughout The Things They Carried, in sections such as âSpin,ââHow to Tell a True War Story,ââAmbush,ââNotes,â and âThe Lives of the Dead,â the author explores his ideas about what it means to be a writer and about the purpose of stories: whatever else it is, the book is also a work of metafiction. As OâBrien explained in an interview, the book âis sort of half novel, half group of stories. Itâs part nonfiction, tooâ (Naparsteck 7): âItâs a new form, I think. I blended my own personality with the stories, and Iâm writing about the stories, and yet everything is made up, including the commentaryâ (Naparsteck 8).
The collection represents OâBrienâs mastery of his art. It is a mature piece by a mature artist that not only extends his own themes and techniques, but also maps out new terrain in literature: he offers a fusion of the artist with his art form. At least part of the purpose of this fusion is to allow OâBrien to ask what the use of stories is, to inquire of his art what it is for. In âThe Lives of the Dead,â he gives a provisional answer. Stories bring the dead to life: âThe thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of alivenessâ (259â60). With stories, the intersection of memory and imagination, you not only add to your sum of experience, but you participate in a process that salvages some measure of people, places, and events from the dust.
Works Cited
Eder, Richard. âReview of The Things They Carriedâ. In Los Angeles Times (March 11, 1990).
Harris, Robert R. âReview of The Things They Carried.â In New York Times Book Review (March 11, 1990).
Herzog, Tobey C. Tim O’Brien. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim OâBrien. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
Mort, John. ââThe Booklist Interview: Tim OâBrien.ââ Booklist (August 1994).
Naparsteck, Martin. âAn Interview with Tim OâBrien.â Contemporary Literature 32.1 (1991): 1â11.
OâBrien, Tim. Â The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.
Prescott, Peter S. âReview of The Things They Carriedâ. In Newsweek (April 2, 1990).