Annotated Bibliography For The Things They Carried

Lily Trunk

Mrs. Aldridge

English 102

13 February 2023

Literature Annotated Bibliography

Chen, Tina. “Unraveling the deeper meaning: exile and the embodied poetics of displacement in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 39, 1998, file:///C:/Users/Lily/Downloads/Chen%20-%20Unraveling%20the%20Deeper%20Meaning.pdf. In her critical analysis article, “Unraveling the Deeper Meaning”: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Tina Chen explains how O’Brien blurs the line between fiction and truth in his novel. The article starts by describing how O’Brien was obsessed with telling a true war story and how he revisits his war experience through the fiction novel. She

Horner uses examples from not only The Things They Carried, but also If I Die in a Combat Zone and O’Brien’s autobiography to show how O’Brien describes courage as not just the absence of fear, but also the presence of wisdom, temperance, and justice throughout his novels. O’Brien questions old notions of courage and masculinity and the pressure they put on the male psyche. O’Brien describes courage as not just an act of bravery by a soldier in combat but instead as acting wisely and rationally in the presence of fear and having individual control over that fear. Horner compares O’Brien’s ideas of courage to Hemmingway’s ideas of courage stating that O’Brien had a hands-on experience with fear, courage, and war, whereas Hemmingway did not drastically impacting how each author describes courage. This article fits into a larger discussion about the topic as it analyzes how the author’s experiences shape the descriptions they use to explain certain characteristics throughout their novels. It also examines how O’Brien gives more depth to an attribute that is ordinarily defined to have one

O’Gorman begins the article by discussing O’Brien’s earlier war novels and describing how from the beginning he was placed in the ranks of contemporary war writers who were trying to record what was happening in the bloody battles of Vietnam. O’Gornan discusses and uses quotes from O’Brien’s novels If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, and more to show how O’Brien had a wide scope of literature. O’Gorman then goes into discussing how O’Brien links to traditional war writers such as Cooper, Crane, and Hemmingway, and how he was influenced by Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, and more writers. However, O’Gorman’s main analysis of The Things They Carried was in the form of the book, the novel is a composite novel comprised of short stories that flow together to create a whole text. O’Gorman believes that O’Brien composed this form because he felt compelled to move from traditional linear novels to something more complex and richer, in choosing this form he is not just writing about war stories but rather stories of humanity. This piece of writing fits into a larger discussion as it examines how the form of a novel can change perceptions and convey the authors underlying message. The article shows us this by analyzing how, when O’Brien’s short war stories are put together into a composite novel they create one story of