Plot Summary
The Things They Carried is a series of inter-connected short stories about the human experiences of fear, camaraderie, courage, and brutality experienced by combatants of the Vietnam War. O’Brien explores the aftereffects of the war on its veterans, those who are haunted by the ghosts of their fallen fellow combatants and the memories of the Vietnamese people they killed. In these stories, O’Brien, blurs the line between fact and faction as he fictionalizes elements of his own experience of combat in Vietnam, narrating many of the stories from the first person voice and, in other stories, making reference to a character named “Timmy.” In “The Man I Killed”, he imagines the life of the young Vietnamese soldier that he killed and in “How to Tell a True War Story” he tells the story of a member of his unit who is overcome with grief at the loss of a friend and takes it out by brutalizing a water buffalo. This is a work of fiction that speaks to a wide range of readers, from those who can’t get enough of war-stories to those who don’t think they can bring themselves to read about Vietnam but get swept up in the human element of this work, the reflections on friendship, love and loss.
Critical Evaluation
One of the most compelling (and sometimes confounding) elements of this work is its grey areas, the line that hovers here between truth and fiction. Readers oftentimes tumble headlong into the narrative thinking that they are reading O’Brien’s actual account of his memories as a Vietnam vet. He writes movingly about the members of his Alpha unit, even going so far as to dedicate the book to “the men of Alpha Company, in in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa” all of whom are key “characters” in the short stories. The confusion that arises gets to the heart of one of the main themes of this work: What is truth? Why do we tell stories, and what is the purpose of those stories? In The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes, “Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83) Discussions of these questions make for hours (heck, a lifetime!) of stimulating and important conversations.
Reader’s Annotation
This is a rare work of fiction that blends genre, voices, fact and fiction to bring the experience of combat in Vietnam to life.
Information about the Author
In Gale’s Contemporary Author’s Online, we learn about novelist Tim O’Brien.
“Award-winning author Tim O'Brien is perhaps best known for his fictional, yet gripping, portrayals of the Vietnam conflict, especially of its people. Based on his own combat exposure, O'Brien delves into the American psyche and the human experience as he writes not only of what actually happened, but also the emotional and psychological impact of the war. In highly praised novels such as The Things They Carried, Going after Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods, he explores the war and its aftershocks from many vantage points, some intimate and some more distant. "But to label O'Brien a Vietnam author seems limiting, even simplistic," Library Journal contributor Mirela Roncevic maintained, "for his work has incessantly challenged his storytelling skills, demonstrating his ability to write both lucidly and succinctly while exploring the arcane relationship between fact and fiction, reality and imagination."
...
“Drafted immediately following his graduation from Macalester College in 1968, O'Brien served two years with the U.S. infantry. In a Publishers Weekly interview with Michael Coffey, O'Brien explained his motivation in writing about the war as his need to write with "passion," and commented that to write "good" stories "requires a sense of passion, and my passion as a human being and as a writer intersect in Vietnam, not in the physical stuff but in the issues of Vietnam--of courage, rectitude, enlightenment, holiness, trying to do the right thing in the world."Genre
Short stories, War Fiction, Meta-Fiction
Curriculum Ties
A perfect companion for any study of the Vietnam War. This is also a helpful companion text when students are writing personal narratives and telling stories from their own lives.
Reading Level/ Interest Age
16+
Challenge Issues
There are references to violence in this work of fiction. If the book were challenged, I would turn to ALA's Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials.
Why Included?
I’ve taught The Things They Carried, and it has stimulated some of the richest class discussions I’ve ever had with groups of students. It is one of the most compelling looks at memory, kinship, love and loss, particularly among men, that I have ever read. The Things They Carried has entered the contemporary canon and is an important work to talk about with all kinds of readers, young and old.
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