The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a very unique war novel due to O’Brien’s focus in the book. The novel is centered around the emotions that revolve around being in Vietnam and not on the actual events that happened. For example in the story “The Man I killed”, the emphasis is not on the fact that someone was killed. Instead, O’Brien aims to capture the emotional response someone has after taking a life and the guilt he would feel. O’Brien admits that everything in the novel may not be true. However the importance is not on whether the events actually happened, it is based upon the emotion that the story evokes. There is difficulty in relaying the emotion of someone in a certain scenario(such as killing someone) to someone who has never been in that situation. For example in the story “Field trip”, O’Brien takes his daughter the place where Kiowa dead. Because Kathleen was not there during his death she cannot understand the significance of the place; she also does not understand the war in general.

O’Brien writes the stories because it helps him cope with the trauma he faced in the war and it helps him make sense of his past. On page 36 O’Brien states, “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” which reveals that O’Brien uses the stories he writes to be understand his present by learning from his past in order to hypothesize how it will affect his future. It’s ironic that O’Brien does not tell stories to share his experiences with others, but writes the stories for self-understanding.

There are also no long battle scenes that portray the intensity of war; O’Brien focuses on the mundane things. In the first chapter, “The Things They Carried”, O’Brien lists out the various things that the soldiers bring to war. In the military where soldiers face life and death the things they bring with them from home would seem unimportant. However the items the soldiers bring with them represent a connection they have to home and place they can return to after the war is over. It is this connection that gives the soldiers the drive to keep going. O’Brien shows that war is not simply about shooting the enemy and returning a hero. Much of the soldiers’ time in Vietnam is spent sitting around, waiting and being bored and it is in these times that they need something to anchor themselves with.

The final chapter of the novel, “The Lives of the Dead” takes place before the war and is seemingly unrelated. However Linda represents O’Brien’s first encounter with both love and death; O’Brien has no control over Linda’ death. Because many things are out of his control, O’Brien dwells on the decisions he makes and the things that are within his control.