Where Are We Going with This? Book Review of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

 

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, we are given an insight into what being a grunt in Vietnam looked like. We learn stories of death and horror and desensitization and survival. We learn how it felt to kill and how it felt to be wounded. We learn how the men supported each other and sometimes failed each other.

The title story of The Things They Carried is widely taught and anthologized, and for good reason. In “The Things They Carried,” the driving force behind the story is the anaphoric phrase, “the things they carried” followed by the literal and figurative things that the soldiers schlepped with them as they traveled through Vietnam. The story is poetic and lyrical, in large part because of the repeated phrase, but also because of the attention to rhythm and detail. For example, the story begins with First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, who is leading the men, and who is carrying letters from a young woman as well as her pictures. The bigger weight is his love and desire for her, which is unrequited.

The opening story begins the juxtaposition of men who are not emotionally prepared for the violence, hatred, and indifference of war. None seem to be career military, just men who were drafted and heeded the call. They are united by their fear of death, their desire to live, and their methods of staying sane.

The stories in the book are all clearly linked, and more than once, a story is followed by a metafiction account of what was changed to make it a story and why. The narrator does not figure as a character in the opening story, but as the book continues, his status as character grows and wanes, but his importance as author to the stories certainly grows. He is the one who remembers for all of those young men, who extends their mortality by writing about them, and who alters the stories to make them into stories and to create justice, explore emotions, and to just give the experiences meaning. Has the truth been altered? Yes. Has the Truth been altered? O’Brien takes pains to help us think not.

The stories are dark and terrible, as you would assume. They are uncomfortable to read. But the book is just as much about writing as it is about war.

Would I teach this book? Short answer, yes. Longer answer, if reading the entire book of short stories, it seems more appropriate for a higher level literature course in which the students could appreciate the technical beauty and sophistication of the stories. As stated previously, the book is as much a collection of short stories as it is a discussion of writing and the process of transforming life into art.

View all my reviews