Tim O'Brien's award winning novel "The Things They Carried" tells the story of a protagonist who is apparently Tim O'Brien himself. In the real world O'Brien did participate in the Vietnam war, even though he calls this book fiction. The book focuses allot on the platoon of which he is a part of during the war. The book uses a very unusual narrative because it jumps from one time period to the next. In one chapter Tim is a young man who just got his draft notice, in the next he is already an older man with a wife and kids. Sometimes Tim's narrative makes reading the book somewhat difficult because it takes a bit of time to place the context where the current story takes place. Although once you do place the time period O'Brien stories take place, he tells them quite well.
The opening chapter of the book does well to get you engaged because it literally listed the things the soldiers carried with them into battle. There were standard things like guns and rations but there were also unusual items like bubblegum, comics, and Kool-Aid. One character in particular was unusual. Lt. Jimmy Cross, the ranking officer in their platoon, was obsessed with this one girl he knew back at his house. The way the book described his feelings it seemed to be more of an obsession than anything. He constantly carried a picture of Martha. It also appears to be a one sided love affair because they have never even embraced from what the book tells us. Although Martha does write letters to Lt. Cross she seems slightly bored by him. Lt. Cross says that he actually cared more about Martha than about fighting the war. Thus when Ted Lavender died he blamed himself because he believed that he payed more attention to his one sided love affair for Martha than for the well being of his squadron. He is so upset over this death that he burned all his remaining pictures of Martha in protest. I think the opening chapter introduces all the important characters in the novel and reveals some aspects of their personalities by telling us what they each carried.
My personal favorite story of the book is O'Briens account of when he received his draft letter. He had a major conflict with himself. He was not sure if he would join the army and risk fighting and dying or running across the border to Canada. He gets right up to the border of the country before staying at a shack with a kind older man who helps Tim make his decision. I like this chapter because I could relate to his predicament. I cant imagine what it will be like to get that draft notification in the mail. I would probably react like O'Brien and think that the army must have made a mistake. I would think how could they want me to fight, I cant pull the trigger when the time comes. Hopefully I will never have to face such a difficult predicament in my lifetime. I can definitely sympathise with Tim's feelings of anxiety and desire to run. At such a young age I don't think that most of us can imagine going to a foreign country and risking our lives to fight a war that we have no interest in. In fact Tim even said he was slightly against the war. O'Brien is certainly not the typical protagonist as he himself mentions he is not brave and heroic like the heroes he knew from childhood, instead he chose the cowardly path and did not live up to his idea of a hero. What struck me about this was that Tim said that the cowardly choice was to go fight the war. Common sense would tell us that the cowardly choice would be to run away, instead he feels because he doesn't go against the opinion of the majority and run away he is thus a coward. He also is hesitant to start a new life away from his friends, family, and all he knows knows in Canada.
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Tim O'Brien's award winning novel "The Things They Carried" uses a very unusual narrative that constantly jumps from one time period to the next. In one chapter Tim is a young man who just got his draft notice, in the next he is already an older man with a wife and kids. Tim O'Brien's writing style is similar to the flow of memories a person has. Instead of going chronologically memories jump from one event to the next. "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end" (36). In this quote Tim's character shows that memory has no coherent chronology, like the book. I can almost see the character of Tim sitting down and just writing what came into his head at the time. Of course, this is all done on purpose to disorient the reader.
ReplyDeleteTim purposely plays with the minds of the reader by constantly contradicting himself. In one chapter he might say that he swears that the story he wrote is absolutely true. In the next chapter he might outright say that everything written in the book is fiction. Using these means to confuse his audience. I think Tim O'Brien is trying to send us a message about what a story really is. "Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story" (38). I think that in this quote O'Brien implies that stories don't have to make sense. Instead he wants the stories he tells to convey some kind of meaning to the reader. Even if the stories are not fact they convey a message about the war. In his constant contradictions; I think Tim hopes readers will learn to read the message under the text.
Tim O'Brien also plays with the notion of truth within the context of the story. Some of the writing seems passionate and brutally honest, while other parts of the text just seem ridiculous. For example, the death of Kiowa is one instance of poignant writing. Kiowa is seen as a symbol of hope for the entire novel. His death in a field of shit is very symbolic of all the tragedy that took place in Vietnam. On the other hand Rat Kiley's story of the Sweetheart of the Sang Tra Bong is simply ridiculous. Its hard to believe that a middle class American girl could find a way to Vietnam and then run wild with the Green Berets. The Kiowa story shows the tragedy of a good religious man dying in sewage. It represents the horror of the war. The story about the American girl showed the ability of the war to corrupt the purest of people. She was a normal teenage girl but Vietnam changed her. This symbolized, to an extreme, the transformation all the soldiers experienced in Vietnam. The contrast between these two stories show, once again, O'Brien's ability to play with the minds of the reader. The message Tim O'Brien gives is that the context of the story is unimportant, instead its lessons are what matter.
The opening chapter of the book literally listed all the things the soldiers carried with them. I think one purpose of this chapter was to introduce us to the main cast of characters. For instance the chapter said that Kiowa always carried a bible around with him. This automatically gives the reader the impression that Kiowa is a religious man.
ReplyDeleteThe opening chapter also highlights the emotional burdens of the characters. One of the characters Lt. Jimmy Cross was infatuated with this one girl, Martha, he knew back in the US. He constantly carried a picture of Martha with him. This picture symbolized the idea of the girl back home that almost every soldier had. The fact that Cross carried around the picture of Martha, although it was painfully obvious she did not have feelings for him, shows how the soldiers used the symbol of the girl back home as a distraction from what was going on around them. "On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out the column, to keep their eyes open, but he would slip away into daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey Shore, with Martha" (9). Cross deluded himself into thinking he loved Martha. In this way, he could use her picture as an escape from the war. He hoped that Martha would keep him sane through the horror's of war.
My personal favorite story of the book is O'Briens account of when Tim, the character, received his draft letter in the mail. He was not sure if he should join the army and risk dying in Vietnam or running across the border to Canada. He gets right up to the border of the country before staying at a shack with a kind older man who helps Tim make his decision. This old man takes the role of hero in Tim's life. "The man that opened the door that day is the hero of my life. How do I say this without sounding sappy? Blurt it out---the man saved me" (48). Tim understood that Elroy, the old man, changed his life. Elroy helped Tim make one of the biggest decisions of his life. I think Tim saw Elroy's passive calmness and bravery as the ideal characteristics of a hero. For instance when they were right up to the border of Canada, Elroy just waited silently for Tim to make his decision. In the end, along with the Lone Ranger, Tim regards this old man as his hero.
When Tim actually goes to war I think he realizes there are is such thing as true heroics in the conventional sense. "I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty...I was terrified" (132-133). Tim, the character, realized that in real life situations, there is no courage bank to draw on. His "heroic" action of killing the enemy was just mindless instinct. He was scared, and reacted. I think this is the point in the book when he lets go of his childhood notions of the courageous hero, and came to conclusion that heroism did not exist in war.
Tim O'Brien ends his novel with a story that has little direct relation to the Vietnam war. The last chapter addresses the death of Tim's childhood love. Tim uses this chapter to show his loss of childhood innocence. Just like "Full Metal Jacket" ends with the singing of the Mickey Mouse song, this book ends with a childhood experience. The death of Linda symbolized the end of his childhood innocence and the start of the misery and death that would become a large part of his adult life. In a way I think Linda's death prepared Tim for the war. She was the first dead body he saw in his life, and the loss of childhood innocence early in his life helped protect him and keep him sane during the war.