Blog 3: The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien starts out The Things They Carried, discussing what the members of Alpha Company carry on their journey in Vietnam. He describes the troops supplies in terms of military issued supplies and the emotional burdens that the men carry. On character, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, embodies the typical soldier who brings pictures from a girl back home. Throughout the book, Tim O’Brien tells many stories. O’Brien wants to show the reader the war without actually telling the true war stories. He provides compelling evidence as to why memories are an imperative part in his stories. The memories the soldiers bring to the war provide them with an escape to the horrible reality of the war. Memories from the war influence the men more after the war. The soldiers are not able to forget the tragedies they witnessed. Another point that O’Brien also illustrates on memories is that even though all the memories O’Brien gives to the reader, it still does not change the meaning of the war. Throughout this book, Tim O’Brien uses stories from the war to really show the reader how important memories are.

The soldiers use memories prior to the war as a way to enervate the war. One symbol that O’Brien uses to give more power to memory is the character Linda. Linda represents elements of the past are brought back through memory. Linda, a classmate of O’Brien’s who died of a brain tumor in the fifth grade, symbolizes O’Brien’s faith that thinking about past memories is the best way for him to negotiate pain and confusion, especially the sadness that surrounds death. “But this too is true: stories can save us…I keep dreaming Linda alive. And Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon…They’re all dead. But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. (O’Brien 225). Linda was O’Brien’s first love and his first experience with death’s senseless arbitrariness. His retreat into his daydreams after her funeral provided him unexpected relief and rationalization. Linda’s presence in the story makes O’Brien’s earlier stories about Vietnam more universal. The experience he had as a child is very poignant as to the way he deals with death in Vietnam and after; it also explains why he has turned to stories to deal with life’s difficulties. Just like Linda, Norman Bowker and Kiowa are immortalized in O’Brien’s stories.

This book is a creation of made up of memories. This does not change what O’Brien is showing the reader. O’Brien, in a multiple of ways, shows that the war changed the soldiers who fought the war. When O’Brien is talking about receiving Bowker’s letter, he thinks about his own experience and how it compares to Bowker’s. He wants to write the frustration that came with the war and how it has affected the soldiers. “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”(158). This particular passage of receiving Bowker’s letter is one of several that support O’Brien’s contention that in storytelling, objective truth is not as important as the feeling that a story gives, which is a main point in this book.