The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
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Book Reviews of The Things They Carried
Book Review: Makes Readers Think
Summary: 5 Stars
Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a collection of pensive stories from the Vietnam War. O'Brien does not inundate the reader with solely the gory details of battle, nor does he mitigate the circumstances (he mentions several moribund soldiers and refers to a man he killed, who had "a star-shaped hole" for an eye), but he eviscerates an underlying problem with war: How does a soldier deal with the arduous task of making others believe the unbelievable things that he experienced in the war? It can be especially frustrating for one to undergo life-changing happenings that one's friends and family do not understand. (In Norman Bowker's case, it even led to suicide.) The book focuses on how truth is relative and even how an event's occurrence does not necessarily make its story truer. O'Brien claims that a true war story is never moral, a true war story cannot be believed, and a true war story often has no point. The book tells the story of Tim O'Brien from when he was college-aged kid, acrimonious about war, to his experiences during the war in the Alpha Company, and after Vietnam, trying to tell stories to his daughter. However, the O'Brien in the story only occasionally shares the same characteristics as the author, proving that the stories in the book are entirely fiction. For example, while both experienced battle in Vietnam, the author Tim neither killed a man in battle nor has a daughter named Kathleen, as the soldier in the story did and had. Like waking up from an especially vivid dream only to realize nothing happened, understanding that the tales in the book are not "true" by common standards can be difficult for readers to comprehend. O'Brien uses this effect to reveal how stories do not need to be correct and how a story can be beneficial for other reasons. Storytelling is like therapy; a person's mind will transform events so he can comprehend them. For that reason, an account of something with no fabricated parts is often less meaningful than a story that a person has ruminated upon and come to terms with. One must deal with painful memories so he can move past them. O'Brien himself probably used this book as a way to actively access his memories from the war, instead of putting them in the back of his mind and frivolously trying to forget about them. The concept of vaguely-defined truth can also be applied to life. O'Brien mentions the death of the man with the "star-shaped hole" eye, the death of Kiowa, the death of Ted Lavender, the death of Curt Lemon, and the death of his childhood sweetheart, Linda. In each one of these cases, the character was really brought to life once their death was explained. Some soldiers in the story even talked to the dead people they found, or shook their hands, as if they were alive. O'Brien struggles with accepting the circumstances of his friends' deaths, and brings them back to life in his mind by thinking about them and telling their stories.
The Things They Carried is a book that makes readers think. Readers are forced to contemplate not only the awful, bellicose nature of the world, but also the deeper meaning of truth. O'Brien uses the context of the Vietnam War to make a point how "story-truth" is sometimes more beneficial than actual truth, and there is often a fine line between the two. In The Things They Carried, some stories are poignant, some stories are droll, but all are thoughtful and expand on the concept of truth and life.
Book Review: great desription of both tangible and intangible things
Summary: 5 Stars
The Things They Carried was a very relevant, to the story, title. The book is all about the things soldiers carry; both tangible and intangible. Not only did Tim O'Brien, the author, talk about what the soldiers carried on their backs, but how much each item weighed. O'Brien places a great deal of emphasis on the weight. Time after time, the weight of items are mentioned. This is especially true in the title chapter. Sometimes the weights are listed by the individual object and sometimes as a sum total at the end of a list of items.Not only are the weights in such detail as to the ounce, but the actual items each man carries is in such detail as to describe the man who carries it. One of the many examples of this use of carried items to describe the character who bares its weight is in the title chapter, "Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap . . . three pairs of socks and a can of dr. Scholl's foot powder . . ." (2-3). From this passage, one can logically deduce Dave Jensen is very concerned about his health, especially the health of his feet. After all, if someone had sick feet he could not walk, let alone run around foreign jungle.
One type of object on which O'Brien tended to dwell, not that it was a bad thing, were the good luck charms and other objects that gave the soldiers hope or helped to distract them from the animosity of the so-called war they were fighting. The objects ranged from a stereotypical rabbit's foot to a good luck pebble to a thumb given to one of the soldiers as a gift. Another soldier carried something that helped to give him the hope that one day he would be able to return home, and that also gave him luck. This aforementioned soldier carried his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck like a child would carry his blanky. He carried it as both a good luck charm and a reminder of the real world back home. Also as reminders of home and escapes from the brutality, soldiers carried things like comic books and one soldier, as a reminder of his heritage, carried moccasins and a hunting hatchet.
These previously mentioned items are some of the tangible items the soldiers carried. The intangible items, the items that weighed heavily, not on the shoulders of the soldiers, but on their hearts. It is the load they must bare that is more difficult then any tangible object could ever weigh. These intangible objects weighed on the hearts, souls, and minds of the soldiers. One of these intangible weights was the weight on one member of the platoon, Lt. Jimmy Cross. He felt responsible for the death of one of the other members of his platoon who was shot by a sniper. Another man, Curt Lemon - a minor character in the story, carried the weight of the embarrassment of being scared of the dentist. One thing that added onto the weight of everything tangible or intangible, was these men were mot fighting a crystal-clear war. These soldiers did not know who their enemies were or why they had to kill these people. Overall, the weight these men carried was almost unbearable, especially the intangible weights that could never be lifted, and O'Brien does an excellent job of making the reader feel as f he is right there in the thick of the war.
Book Review: searing, profound and devastating stories of Vietnam War
Summary: 5 Stars
In what must be considered an autobiographical anthem of his generation, Tim O'Brien's masterful anthology of short stories and thoughtful essays about the war in Vietnam and that war's devastating impact on the sensibilities and consciences of the soldiers who fought is profound, distrubing and extraordinarily illuminating. "The Things They Carried" drives to the core of that horrifying, frustrating war. The work also stands as a vehicle by which the author describes how and why he writes stories about the war, what those stories can do -- both for the reader and the writer, and how stores can shed light on darkness and open imagination to topics the mind would rather not consider. As O'Brien states, "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than hnappening-truth."Each story, deftly anthologized, reveals a distressing, startling or repugnant aspect of the Vietnam War. O'Brien recounts the spiritual degradation and moral abyss soldiers encountered. The perceived pointlessness of the war stands counterbalanced by the exquisitely-detailed descriptions of the Vietnamese landscape. The theatre of war is a literal quagmire, swallowing not only literal life, but symbolic life as well. Honorable men meet invisible enemies, and the resulting doubt, confusion and terror liberate the most dismal aspects of their personalities.
Death surrounds the soldiers, and their perversion of language enables them to survive. Absent a clear moral imperative for fighting and an obvious enemy to conquer and political goals to realize, O'Brien and his platoon members are left to struggle for the only goal which is important: survival. Yet the costs of survival are enormous. "By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By our language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed bodies into piles of waste." Thus, an innocent nurse became a "crispy critter;" a baby was a "roasted peanut."
This coarsening of soldiers is one of the necessary concomitants of permitting civil human beings to engage in horrific actions. But the Vietnam War did not provide American soldiers which the desperately needed moral imperatives, the certainties of purpose and nobility of sacrifice, which could allow the soldier to shed that coarsening upon return to society. O'Brien's heartbreaking description of the death and recovery of his admired friend Kiowa drives directly to the issue of futility and despair. Mortally wounded, Kiowa literally sinks into an excrement-filled field and the platoon becomes encrusted with the stink as they extricate him from the morass.
Suffused with guilt, O'Brien successfully brings the reader into this eerily-stretched world. As soldiers watched their comrades die or lapse into insanity or narcotize themselves on a daily basis or brutalize innocent civilians or maim themselves to escape further exposure, they watched their own lives crumble away. "The Things They Carried" will stand as a conscience-stricken author's tribute to his comrades, an indictment of the spiritual bankruptcy of that war and a hallmark of how short stories can educate and inspire.
Book Review: Humping It
Summary: 5 Stars
The Things They Carried is a masterpiece of storytelling. Tim O'Brien understands how to capture the very essence of feeling. He does so in a way that gives the reader a sensual exploration into the lives and heads of the characters. This approach goes beyond the usual extent to which authors involve the reader and pulls and tugs the reader, heart and soul, into the book.Though his writing style is reminiscent of Hemingway, Tim O'Brien's approach to storytelling is different. Hemingway normally expected the reader to fill in necessary details and emotions about the characters, whereas O'Brien envelopes the reader with sensory clues about the inner feelings and external influences of the characters. It does not matter if the events in the story truly took place; O'Brien is simply giving the reader an overall sense of the emotional burdens and fears and concerns of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations. Maybe Curt Lemon never stepped on a rigged mortar round, in the end it does not really matter because the threat was always there, and like a mental torture device it played with and rang out the minds of every young man in Vietnam. The threat was so visceral, so cut-to-the-heart, that when events like that really happened, it was as though it happened a million times before in the heads of each boy.
Boys--that's what they were. Each one had his baggage to carry, not just the physical baggage carried upon their backs, but emotional baggage too. And while they could easily discard some of the weight off their shoulders during a day's worth of humping, there was no way to rid themselves of hearing the noises of Vietnamese music echoing in their ears, cries from children who were scorched by napalm, the gurgle of blood in the lungs of a VC boy of about twenty, or the dull click of a rigged mortar round; or of seeing the density of it all, the thick Vietnamese canopy, the thick monsoon fog, the vermilion-colored stains, the moss-green mud upon the face of a fallen comrade, or the sunlight upon the face of Curt Lemon as he was pulled into a tree in pieces; or of smelling the stench of blood and mud-soaked uniforms, excrement-laden fields, C-rations, jungle plants, stagnant water, monsoon rains, layers upon layers of insect repellent; or of tasting the lemony-stomach acid as it rises in your throat, the copper-tinged blood in your mouth, the acrid-fish-flavored manure field along the Song Tra Brong river; or of feeling the supple-leather combat boot as your buddy slipped below the surface of a muddy plain, the whithered pages of an oft-read illustrated New-Testament against your face as you dream, and the forty pounds of supplies, weapons, and keepsakes upon your back--forty friggin' pounds! You feel it all--experience it all.
It was these things that Tim O'Brien set out to do when he composed The Things They Carried, and he does them beautifully. What are human beings but the sum experiences that we perceive with our five senses? The way things "seem." Tim O'Brien captures what must have been like in Vietnam through his splendidly-crafted portrayal of these senses. It's this sensual journey into the thick of it all that makes Tim O'Brien's book a masterpiece.
Book Review: "I want you to know why the story-truth is truer sometimes
Summary: 4 Stars
O'Brien's "work of fiction" entitled "The Things They Carried" is a eye-catching work of art dedicated to the men of the artificial Alpha company. Although very good, O'Brien's work weaves in and out of great writing and diverts to points that are sometimes unrealistic or obviously untrue. We see examples of off the course writing in the chapter entitled The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong, in which a girl visits her boyfriend in the war and never returns because she becomes "dangerous" and "ready for the kill." Although captivatingly interesting, this story delves deeply into a pit of unrealism and uncertainty as to why things occur and the reasons for the occurrences. O'Brien also deviates early in the book when he actually writes about the things they carried. He begins most paragraphs with "they carried." Although O'Brien means for the book to be about figuratively carrying, it seems that he means it almost too literally in the beginning. Furthermore, in many instances it is extremely hard to tell when O'Brien speaks of real events transpiring or fictional ones that seem that real. The most obvious of these violations comes to me as the description of the man he killed. Through his repetition of the description of the mangled body and the "star shaped hole," O'Brien breathes sympathy into our lungs but then knocks it out when he states that he did not kill the man.O'Brien's story has palpable weakness and flaw but his story goes much deeper than the simplicity of carrying things and killing men. He speaks deeply to everyone through his use of good writing and thematically placed persuasion. His good writing is scattered across the pages of the book but the instance of the checkers game comes to mind. O'Brien starkly contrasts the simple, black and white rules of checkers to the not so obvious rules of warfare in Vietnam. His fine writing style also appears in the chapter entitled Speaking of Courage. In this chapter he briefly describes Norman Bowker's return back to the United States where he does not receive his hero's welcome or even simple recognition at that. He is isolated in a world that is not his own any more. This reminds me of countless returning war stories that place emphasis on the unwelcome return and the out-of-place feeling that the returning soldiers face. Although I have complained of O'Brien's seemingly unreal reality, it is this hazy line between reality and fiction that gives the book distinctiveness and rarity in the "war story" genre. We see the unique blend several times including his use of Norman Bowker in the same chapter. Although the story of him circling the lake is untrue, it is true that he kills himself because he felt the way O'Brien portrays him. We also see the truth versus fiction in the story about O'Brien's nine-year-old crush, Linda, who dies of a malignant brain tumor. In this story he recants his experience as a nine-year-old. We know the story cannot be entirely factional because it is impossible for him to remember events that occurred many years ago. O'Brien's sporadic use of the untrue and great writing combine to easily counteract the bad writing to create something unique and innate to O'Brien.