The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
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Book Reviews of The Things They Carried
Book Review: Interesting Mix of Fiction and Story Telling
Summary: 3 Stars
After the first few chapters...this review was headed towards a negative input. I didn't like the idea of a story being 95% BS and 5% "maybe" truth of some kind. But, I found as I continued that I actually liked the read of this book. I just constantly shook my head every few seconds as I reminded myself that most of the facts and settings were "made up" and mostly untrue.
As a person who has been to war and been among the fighting men and women of our armed forces. I found allot of fantasy in Tim O'Brien's book. This is not the way most soldiers, sailors and/or Marines act. Not knowing his fact from fiction made it less enjoyable than knowing for sure. I guess it was meant to be that way in his story for flair. There is unfortunately at times allot of double talk that makes very little sense but again that may be the intent of the author.
There are glimmers of hope in this book and one of those that really stood out as impressive is submitted below. I am surprised he could come up with it. But it made the entire read worthwhile
On page 81 he says:
"In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond...for me it was the blackened skies from burning oil wells, at noonday, in Saudi Arabia and the desert sand blowing into large drifts.... And although in the morning you must cross the river and do terrible things and maybe even die. Even so, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not."
This was his most powerful and profound statement and caused me to give him the respect due and finish his book. The book is not the work of a genius or great writer or author as so many of those mindless reviewers in the front of the book tried to make it or him out to be. But it is a work worth looking at and considering.
They seemed more bent on trying to "out-lie" the next reviewer and/or use 75-cent phrases to say a two-cent statement of "that a boy" Mr. O'Brien.
Glorifying him, as the plethora of reviewers of this book have done to a point of boredom, when it could have included two or three and been more than sufficient, made them all completely superficial and more canned than true evaluations. As far as being in the same league as the great historical authors of our time, this was a gross mistake on their part. But proved quite handily that "professing themselves to be wise (reviewers) they became fools"!
They should be ashamed of themselves for putting this book on even the lowest rung of the ladder of great works of the past. Or they should at least have their salaries cut by two-thirds. They are getting paid far too much for these false-fronted and elevated evaluations. One of O'Brien's remarks adapted merely to address these puppet reviewers of dogma does seem to fit these individuals...very well.
"He (they) has (have) an opinion of himself (themselves), I think, that was (is) too high for his (their) own good.
In my humble opinion although he can write a tale as good as the next man, woman or child...and his main theme of "we all carry burdens in every aspect of our daily lives...which agreeably...get worse in times of war",it a book of interest but not one of great aclaim. I find nothing so monumental in his work to place him in a historical relevance with countless other great authors I have read.
It is a pleasant read...as a writer's attempt at comedy and tear jerking stories about a very serious subject of America's past and the burdens we carry to, during and after conflicts or war. Burdens each and every man, woman and child on earth carry within.
Book Review: The Things They Carried
Summary: 4 Stars
Imagination is a generally good quality in writing, veering off onto paths we would not normally take, befriending strangers we would avoid, and jumping of cliffs we would not approach for the best dare. Authors are lauded for literature that leaps over the fence of strict reality for the lengthy fields lying behind them. And yet, when it comes to stories of pain and perseverance, we push aside our applause for creativity and desperately cling to every scrap of truth we can find, pointing to the fact that an event actually occurred as proof of its meaningful nature. Tim O'Brien carries no such need for veracity, at least, not in the way we generally define it. Indeed, Mr. O'Brien is as uninhibited by traditional writing styles as his soldiers are loaded with ammunition and M-16s. His novel The Things They Carried does start off a little a la cliché with inventories of what soldiers carried as they "humped" through Vietnam, giving me a mental shudder as I predicted the rest of the book to be a fatuous, sapped-down version of a war story focusing just on overly humanizing a soldier endured with descriptions of how they loved their mom, their friend, their girlfriend, their house, the wind in the meadows. To be fair, he did have courage to blatantly connect his title to the story so early on in the first chapter. Thankfully, though, O'Brien abandons the physical embodiment of his title relatively early on, and the rest of the novel is more concerned with the more complex mental baggage of these soldiers before, during and after the war, not the material load. After he dumps this first style, other basic aspects we take for granted in novels follow in quick suit. Chronology, lack of redundancy, truthfulness, overdone themes- all of these are cumbersome to O'Brien, and he has no qualms about dumping them with as much irreverence as he gives to the reader's quest to find a moral in his stories. And yet, it is his very carelessness with the truth that makes us trust him, and initially, his ideas about perception versus reality and gut instinct and the fact that truth does not rely on occurrence and the importance of recounting being unmitigated make us want to cover the text with five shiny gold stars and appreciative comments worthy of a New York review. Indeed, the chapter these philosophies are mostly in, "How to Tell a True War Story," is one of his strongest. But like many a good writer, his discovery that he has found a unique idea gets him a little carried away, and he takes his creative policy a little too far, and what was at first commendable becomes pernicious. It was not that he needed to lie less, but that he needed to tell the truth more often- a certain degree of truth is needed to make falsehoods believable, and his underestimation of reader skepticism detracts a star from his rating. It's true that the multiple versions and twists he gives to the stories of Kiowa's death, the man killed by a grenade, and Norman Bowker's life, even the narrator's own perspective, (confusing because his name is also Tim O'Brien, but the author later admits that the narrator says things that he disagrees with, such as the beauty of war) help me to understand the horrors of death and war through a human perspective, without the glorified magnanimity of the "over there" spirit. But they ultimately transcend comprehension, and at some point, a realization comes that having a certain amount of events actually happening does matter to a reader who has never been to war, regardless of O'Brien's ability to beautifully combine humor and sadness in a seamless tale. To his credit, though, he finishes the novel off with the jewel of his collection, "The Lives of the Dead", an incredibly touching story about a girl he knew in grade school who died from leukemia, proof of his ability to move with a story more can relate to. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of O'Brien's book is not that he ruins an originally good theme with repetition that turns genius into echolalia, but that his readers will never fully be able to appreciate the complexity of the stories he tries to tell.
Book Review: The Things They Carried
Summary: 5 Stars
War has an unquestionably diverse effect on each person who is unfortunate enough to experience it. To some, war brings a feeling of pride and glory. Other individuals gather knowledge, wisdom, and experience from it. And still, the overwhelming majority of men and women lose a part of themselves. Their feelings of superiority to others, their appreciation of life's struggles, and their personalities, all become seriously redefined in ways unimaginable. In Tim O'Brien's literary masterpiece, The Things They Carried, many of these things are touched upon. Readers receive the same sorrow, horror, and harshness that the soldiers of the Vietnam War felt during their tours of duty. Each detailed event in this miraculous collection of short stories paints a vivid image of varying characteristics of the war, giving way to a unique method of discovering the brave (and sometimes, cowardly) men and women that defined this controversial era.
Tim O'Brien is a highly-regarded author in addition to being a Vietnam veteran. O'Brien won the 1979 National Book Award in Fiction for his novel, Going After Cacciato, and Time Magazine awarded his book In the Lake of the Woods as the best novel of 1994. The Things They Carried is no slouch either when it comes to exorbitant praise from the critics, as it has already won the honor of France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etanger.
This praise is well deserved. Each time the reader dives into this lush collection of fictional shorts, they will undoubtedly learn the monstrosities of battle. O'Brien depicts the soldiers of the war as being young Americans with "no sense of strategy or mission", who "carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity." They were filled with "a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility." These uses of imagery compose literate, beautiful, and yet harshly realistic descriptions of the men in uniform. The book becomes even more terrifyingly real when more gruesome events are portrayed. Tim O'Brien flexes his poetic muscle almost to the point of beauty throughout the book, easily prevalent when he describes even the most disgusting of images. A dead man becomes an object of significant elegance and exquisiteness, even when "his jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, [and] his one eye was a star-shaped hole."
Most war stories reach their limit once they have exhausted the themes of gore and scare-factor. O'Brien refuses to end his novel here, and continues to bring the meaning to a whole new level. O'Brien questions the very accuracy and credibility of war stories told by those who have seen it all. He makes radical claims, and without hesitation, says,"[a] war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done." The narrator continues by saying, "[if] a story seems moral, do not believe it." The number of different ways to interpret this added twist to the theme could startle the reader. Is Tom O'Brien demonstrating how the war ripped him apart, or is he claiming that his experiences have given him the wisdom to conjure up such thoughts? Is his own novel a victim to the same problems? As the stories progress, through the latter half of the book, this theme is built upon with graceful, emotional prose.
Tim O'Brien succeeds where many shallow war stories fail miserably. He creates a tangible, realistic recreation of one of the most tragic wars in history, and even takes it a step further by questioning the very characteristics that are added to these stories and their authenticity. O'Brien furnishes the essence of entity, mute wretchedness, and tenderness into one profound package. The Things They Carried gives insight into times that are still greatly misunderstood today, and gives character to this era of war that is veiled by the shadow of misconception.
Book Review: If You Don't Care for Obscenity, You Don't Care for the Truth
Summary: 5 Stars
Perhaps any book about war reads like an anti-war book. Perhaps the best fiction reads like nonfiction. And perhaps it is impossible to provide a factual account of the events and the effects of the Vietnam War, but in a strange way, Tim O'Brien's fictional novel The Things They Carried paints a more accurate and chilling portrayal of the Vietnam War than any textbook ever can. O'Brien's book reads like a factual retelling of war stories (with the exception of stories like "Good Form," where O'Brien reveals that everything in his book is made up, even the parts that contain a character named Tim O'Brien), with characters like Kiowa and Rat Kiley, who are based on real people but are described in such intricate detail and contain such human characteristics that it is initially difficult for the reader to comprehend that O'Brien's characters are all fictitious. Throughout twenty-two stories, O'Brien delves into ideas like truth, fiction, courage, storytelling, and war, thankfully choosing to use fiction to explore the major themes, instead of pedagogically explicating his own opinions about them.
By blurring the line between fact and fiction, by telling a story and then admitting that the story is completely made up, O'Brien tests the very boundaries of fiction to provide an "accurate" representation of the experiences of American combat troops in Vietnam. After a certain point, the fact that O'Brien's stories are fictitious no longer matter, because they easily could have been true, and they deal with themes that applied throughout the war. For instance, whether or not there actually was a baby buffalo that Rat Kiley butchered after witnessing the death of Curt Lemon is of little to no consequence. What matters is that the realities of the war, the deaths of friends and the constant psychological stress, made stories about Rat Kiley's breakdown completely plausible. In the real world it is difficult enough to separate what actually happened from what seemed to happen, and O'Brien makes the reader realize that it doesn't matter whether certain things are true or not; what matters is the grounding reality that distant global forces were responsible for the war, were responsible for so many dead best friends and so many mental and physical scars on the survivors.
For O'Brien, stories are powerful things, stories have the ability to revive the dead in your mind, stories help the ground soldiers cope with the psychological difficulties engendered by the war. O'Brien writes of death and terror, but also tells stories of soldiers who trick-or-treated through Vietnamese towns while nude and soldiers who enjoyed the orderliness and regularity of daily games of checkers. One of O'Brien's most poignant stories is "On the Rainy River," where O'Brien's character despairs over the choice between complying with the draft board and going to war, or fleeing to Canada, the latter of which O'Brien's character views as the more "courageous" action.
Besides being a masterful piece of literature that tests the boundaries of fiction, O'Brien's The Things They Carried is significant for the new, unmitigated perspective that it lends to the still-murky aspects of the Vietnam War, and serves as an important reminder of the horrific nature of war for America's youth, too young to remember Vietnam but insulated from the effect of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on American combat troops. As O'Brien reminds us, "If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote."
Book Review: Live with Pain, Die with Peace
Summary: 5 Stars
Honored by the Pulitzer Prize, the ultimate bestseller The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien tells us about O'Brien's true personal stories in Vietnam War. His realistic war stories often drive us to the Vietnam in 1960's. This "work of fiction" may seem as a collection of short stories, but these little pieces are wonderfully woven to sculpt this masterpiece. Even though the writer may not have stayed in the Tip Top Lodge or his friends might not have died through gory and painful moments, his heartbreaking way of telling war stories creates these remarkable stories.
O'Brien opens up the new chapter of the war stories as he recollects his memories. He mentions his friends' death and how they have influenced soldiers in the battlefield. One soldier's death seriously impacts first lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, who considers himself accountable for Ted's death. Jimmy's soldiers also realize how the death of their friend come to them, how they need to be alert about this new environment, and what they really care. The narrator also wanders between the margin of the exile and the war, and he finally makes his decision in favor of his conscience.
Since this is a "work of fiction," we know that stories in The Things They Carried may not be true. He might not have seen his friends dying. He might not have known his friends, Rat Kiley, Kiowa, and others. However, these stories still come close to our hearts because his true, touching descriptions of the scenes make us believe them. Also, his lessons on how to write the true stories make us even more to believe his stories as he takes us to Vietnam and makes us see what has happened in 1960's. As he narrates events that have happened around him, he finally binds them together, making a beautiful, heartbreaking fiction.
Tim O'Brien erases the invisible line between the truth and the fiction which shows his skillful way of writing. It seemed that he had undergone through painful experiences such as his friends' death and the loss of the lover, but as I read more, it was difficult to tell whether he actually saw these happening. Furthermore, the instructions on how to write the true story may be wrong since this book is still constrained as the fiction. However, they make us believe what he is telling us and also his examples that he has given. As we believe more of his examples, he finally blinds us to believe this whole book. This amazing trick connects his war stories to the profound meaning of our lives.
This book is limited in a sense that it can only be written from the view of another soldier. Therefore, the larger scale of the characters' development can't be seen. Readers can only know the superficial knowledge about most of the soldiers. O'Brien mostly describes things from his own view and thus obstructs readers from looking at different angles. O'Brien needs to balance between his view and other people's view of life.
The Things They Carried tells us the real true stories of the war in Vietnam, and questions to everyone: what do you live for? This general question does not only belong to soldiers in the battlefield but also belongs to people who are lost in the middle of the road, questioning about life. We do not realize what we want in our lives until we are in need of them. Do you live for your love? Do you live because you do not want to be embarrassed not to live? And he finally makes a general fact of life, "And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait" (211).