The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tim O'BrienEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-12-29
ISBN: 0767902890
Number of pages: 246
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of The Things They Carried
Book Review: War, Storytelling, and Truth
Summary: 4 Stars
Tim O'Brien's, The Things They Carried, beguiles readers with its prose and its vast exploration of topics from war to storytelling and truth. O'Brien uses his own life experiences and self-narration to create trust in the reader. In addition, his writing is so striking that the reader begins to feel as if bullets will whiz by at any moment. Some readers would not even be surprised if the different characters started to step boots first from the pages, carrying their M-16's and C-rations, while continuing with their constant repartee. O'Brien's unmitigated usage of imagery and diction in order to depict the realities and aimlessness of war are certainly effective. However, at times he also refutes the truth of his own incendiary stories, causing the reader much frustration and interfering with the power of his message.
Tim O'Brien's book encompasses the entire war experience--- from the draft notice to the return to life in the United States, with the war in between. "On the Rainy River," is a chapter centered on O'Brien's own pre-war struggles. He begins,
"This one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my parents, not to
my brother or sister, not even to my wife. To go into it, I've always thought,
would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a sudden need to be elsewhere,
which is a natural response to a confession." (39)
This significantly adds to his ethos as a narrator. O'Brien shows us the importance of the events he is sharing with us by emphasizing that he has never had the magnanimity to disclose the information to anyone before. He shows the readers trust and in return the readers learn to trust him. He also makes clear that he has had first hand experience with all the emotions that coincide with bellicose times. He goes on throughout the majority of the story to talk about the happenings during the war, sometimes flashing backwards to himself as a child or back and forth in war scenes. He also writes as his present 43-year old self occasionally and recounts post-war stories and feelings of meaningless.
The Things They Carried has the arduous task of making people understand the realities of war. Through a myriad of movies and books over the centuries, war has been portrayed as a grand undertaking. O'Brien's purpose is to depict the true vacuous and nefarious nature of war. In the chapter, "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," O'Brien recounts a story he was told by one of the men in his platoon. In the story a medic decided to send for his girlfriend from the States to Vietnam. She come and is very curious about war and slowly starts to drift away from her boyfriend. After a while, she became a completely different person, consumed by Vietnam, and it was said that she disappeared one night.
"She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her
culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous.
She was ready for the kill." (116)
Such stories were always taken with a grain of salt, however they were not disregarded because in Vietnam anything seemed plausible. In, "Ghost Soldiers," O'Brien tells a story of a time in Nam when he searched for revenge at all ethical costs. In the middle of a fight O'Brien had been shot in the butt and it took the new medic a long time to reach him. When he finally did, he failed to treat for shock. O'Brien was consequently in a huge amount of pain for a long time and taken out of the field. He never seemed to let this go even though the medic obviously felt horrible for what he had done. He planned his revenge so that he would spook the medic during his night guard duty. He went to such lengths to make this man feel the fear that he had felt that he, "turned mean inside" (200). Such stories seem absurd and do not follow the standard war stories we have seen depicted in other medias. O'Brien successfully tears down the idealism of war and turns the whole idea on its head. However, he can sometimes muddy his powerful message with his writing style.
As O'Brien toys with the ideas of truth and fiction he subsequently interferes with his own message. He makes the point that truth is not something that is felt, but something that is known. While this is a profound idea, his examples to the reader often cause frustration. In, "The Man I Killed," O'Brien tells an entire story about a Vietnamese man he threw a grenade at. He shows the pain he felt for the death he had caused. Yet, he then goes back on the entire story and says that it is not true. Tim O'Brien is trying to make the reader understand the feelings of confusion and aimlessness that our men felt in Nam. However, his countless stories that are told with such great detail and feeling, which are then exposed as lies, often distract the reader from O'Brien's purpose. He also uses the fragmented plot line that Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is so famous for. Although O'Brien often loses the reader when it comes to the validity of his story, his flashbacks and forwards are well written and it is clear to the reader where the particular story is placed, which is more than can be said for Vonnegut and his writing.
Summary of The Things They Carried
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.
With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber
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