Things They Carry By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien is a wonderful and personal look into one of this countries darkest times. The vivid imagery that the author uses lets the reader actually experience the feeling of actually being in the war. By using the cultural studies method of literary criticism, we can use the social conditions during the time of the writing to explore beneath the surface. What we find underneath just might be more interesting than the story itself.

     In “How to Tell a True War Story” O’Brien explores the relationship between the events during a war and the art of telling those events. O’Brien doesn’t come to a conclusion on what is a true war story. He writes that one can’t generalize the story as well. According to O’Brien, war can be anything from love and beauty to the most horrid

A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe." (560) In this writing, Tim O’Brien explores what it means to have a “true war story.” He uses a contemporary style of writing, such as explaining ideas through stories, using frequent repetition, and having an informal tone, which helps the reader achieve a thorough understanding of a “True war story.” O’Brien is specific in saying that “was is hell,” (561) which simply has no impact because it is so general and clichéd. A true war story is not about valor, but is simply about the outrage a soldier faces during a

20) O’Brien tells how these young men were drafted which were constantly in fear, they wished to be there obliviously but war takes up all of one’s attention; it played a big role in their life, changing their tactics, personality and becoming a new person. O’Brien uses this to show the stressful moments in war where one has pressure to be alive and in this case to fit in with everyone else and feel part of something, in a lonely place such as the war.

First, the reader must understand just what makes a good "war story". The protagonist of the novel, Tim O'Brien, gives us his

Almost like in a manual for story writing, O’Brien starts out every part of this short story by giving away a supposedly important feature of a “true war story” and then giving a matching example to help the reader visualize his lesson.

Within this chapter O’Brien repeatedly reuses the phrase “A true war story” to create emphasis once again. This chapter shows how storytelling can alter an actual experience; depending on how you tell the story. Each story O’Brien tells within this chapter first has a statement then has a story and then another statement to finish. According to O’Brien, true war stories do not generalize, they do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. O’Brien then goes into an actual story about Curt Lemon and his death.

It took Tim O'Brien 20 years after the war was done for him to write the novel The Things They Carried. When O’Brien wrote the novel the things they carried, he had to relive everything he went through. The purpose of writing this novel was to let everyone that was not there themselves know what it was like on a person. O’Brien was the protagonist and the antagonist is the war in Vietnam. When O’Brien wrote this novel his intended audience was people that were not in the Vietnam War. The novel was more mortality and death but, also has shame and guilt a lot throughout the story.

What Do We Carry? When someone asks “what do you carry,” what comes to mind? In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, soldiers who were in Vietnam during the war carried a select number of personal items with them that they valued and had to have with them. These soldiers have given up a lot and have to make decisions when they have to think about what they will keep with them at all times. Throughout the book, O’Brien refers to the question: “What do we carry with us?”

This is especially evident in the stories of O’Brien’s draft and his first killing, Bob Kiley and Curt Lemon’s friendship and his unanswered letter, as well as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s love life. A true war story encompasses the severity and consequences that come along with war: I concur with the author’s outlook on what an authentic war story is defined to be. O’Brien’s objective is to reveal “those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” and how the truth to a war story could never be guaranteed and that the truth is “all relative” (O’Brien 35) because in the end “you can’t even tell a true war story”(O’Brien

Stories can save people as in the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien short story Spin “ Rat Kiley made up a rhyme that caught on, and we'd all be chanting it together: Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're in the pink. All around us, the place was littered with Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and booby-trapped artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man. (Spin.8)”. The thing They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a novel with a series of short stories about his journey in Vietnam and he tell us that stories can bring people back from the dead by always telling their story.

He must make them feel it for what it is, and understand the message they are taking away from it, as well as why that is their chosen message. Especially so in a war story, as the writer must convey the emotional and physical trauma that occurred at the completion of each other’s actions. The central question that asks what an author’s obligations to truths are is one that analyzes what choices the author made to convey

A war story is “a story of a personal experience that usually involves danger, struggle, or adventure.” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) Most commonly, war stories are passed on to future generation by the elderly people. These type of stories are renown for hyperbolizing details, decreasing the authenticity of the actual event. Tim O’Brien, the author of “How to Tell a True War Story,” examines the complex relationship between war experience and storytelling.

“A true war story is never moral” (O’Brien 65), “in any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (O’Brien 67), “a true war story cannot be believed” (O’Brien 66), “you can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end” (O’Brien 72). With these statements, I believe that O’Brien used his own advice to guide the telling of his stories. Not all the stories are his to tell, and in some cases he does so anyway, but it’s clear that these stories have a purpose. His telling of what happened with incredible detail has a reason. If I were to defend this as a novel, as it is in more ways than one, these reasons are the themes that O’Brien is trying to convey, through the plot of the stories.

I believe this allows the reader to empathize with the soldiers for how tough they had to be. The tale allows one to understand what the soldiers had to eat, how they had to sleep, and what they had to carry with them. This makes the war seem astonishingly real and imaginable. This type of writing does a great job of painting a picture for the reader. For me, the picture the writer painted made me feel fortunate and grateful for the people who have fought for me.