Tim O’Brien’s book, “The Things they Carried”, is a fictional book written to take place generally take place in the Vietnam War. With it being a fictional book, O’Brien is writing this book so send a message about what the war was “truly” like and what American soldiers went though. Being a Vietnam veteran, himself, we learn that O’Brian finds comfort from memories of the war through his writing profession.
“The Things they Carried” starts with a chapter about all the things Alpha company carried around with them. O’Brien made sure we knew everything they had from unique, superstitious articles, to guns and ammo, listing the weights of each item. However, by meticulously listing everything they brought along, O’Brian is sending us a deeper message. These men were carrying war on their soldiers. All the physical items, the belts of ammo, the heavy guns, they were all child’s play. The mental burden was what had these men exhausted each night. It is this chapter that shapes the rest of the book to come, a story that focuses on how the men survived the war rather than how they fought it.
O’Brian plays games with the reader throughout the book. While it is fact that the book is fictional, O’Brian uses himself as the narrator of his book and says some stories are true. Are we to believe that he is telling us the truth and that the story is reality, or is this all part of his fictional work? He even writes of conversations and exchanges he has with others from Alpha company years after returning from the war. After much pondering, I have led myself to believe that O’Brian, whether or not he is substituting real people with fictional characters, is telling each story with the intention of conveying messages which all come together by the end. The story of the “Lemon Tree”, and Kiowa “Biting the dirt”, both portray not only disturbing and unfortunate images, but how their comrades dealt with the sudden losses incurred. Some joke about the deaths, not because they don’t care, but because the jokes are what keep them from going insane.
The final chapter focuses more on the narrator O’Brian than the rest of the cast, or even the main story at first. He backs up from the war stories and tells us of his childhood crush when he was a wee lad in the spring of 1956. He fell in love with a sweet little girl whom would soon pass away due to a brain tumor. To have lost someone so important to him at such a young age was difficult for him to embrace. His soon-to-be developed comfort technique in obsessively dreaming about her alive is relatable to the soldier’s ways of developing with the loss of Lemon and Kiowa. The book ends with the notion that everybody somehow remains alive in someone else’s heart and mind, just as Linda, Lemon, and Kiowa are alive in the narrator’s dreams.
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Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things they Carried, is a fictional book written to take place in and out of the Vietnam War. With it being a fictional book, O’Brien is writing to send a message about what the war was “truly” like and what American soldiers went though. Being a Vietnam veteran, himself, we learn that O’Brian finds comfort from memories of the war through his writing profession.
ReplyDeleteThe Things they Carried starts with a chapter about all the things Alpha company carried around with them. O’Brien made sure we knew everything they had from unique, superstitious articles, to guns and ammo, listing the weights of each item. However, by meticulously listing everything they brought along, O’Brian is sending us a deeper message. These men were carrying war on their soldiers. All the physical items, the belts of ammo, the heavy guns, they were all child’s play. The mental burden was what had these men exhausted each night. It is this chapter that shapes the rest of the book to come, a story that focuses on how the men survived the war rather than how they fought it.
O’Brien plays games with the reader throughout the book. While it is fact that the book is fictional, O’Brian uses himself as the narrator of his book and says some stories are true. Are we to believe that he is telling us the truth and that the story is reality, or is this all part of his fictional work? He even writes of conversations and exchanges he has with others from Alpha company years after returning from the war. After much pondering, I have led myself to believe that O’Brien, whether or not he is substituting real people with fictional characters, is telling each story with the intention of conveying messages which all come together by the end. The story of the “Lemon Tree”, and Kiowa “Biting the dirt”, both portray not only disturbing and unfortunate images, but how their comrades dealt with the sudden losses incurred. Some joke about the deaths, not because they don’t care, but because the jokes are what prevent them from going insane.
The final chapter focuses more on the narrator O’Brien than the rest of the cast, or even the main story at first. He backs up from the war stories and tells us of his childhood crush when he was a wee lad in the spring of 1956. He fell in love with a sweet little girl whom would soon pass away due to a brain tumor. To have lost someone so important to him at such a young age was difficult for him to embrace. His soon-to-be developed comfort technique in obsessively dreaming about her alive is relatable to the soldier’s ways of developing with the loss of Lemon and Kiowa. The book ends with the notion that everybody somehow remains alive in someone else’s heart and mind, just as Linda, Lemon, and Kiowa are alive in the narrator’s dreams.