Craftsmanship In The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

Craftsmanship of A Story

During the 1917 October Revolution, Russia gave way to the Marxist Party in less than twenty-four hours. Russian citizens were dramatically affected by the overthrow, and it rippled throughout the world from Vietnam to Cuba to China as nations feared communism’s policies, its threat to sovereignty and to national security. In retaliation, wars waged and hostility grew. Fifty years after the October Revolution, the United States entered into a controversial war alleging to defend democracy. This war lead to conflict, violent protests, hostility, and a generation who questioned the military. Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, captures these emotion as he recounts the Vietnam War through a collection of linked

His stories are not political, and he explains his intent is not to teach a lesson, “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done” (O’ Brien 65). Rather, O’Brien’s focus is centered on the characters’ lives, the relationships formed, and the how his friends and others reacted, responded and survived the war. O’Brien refrains from judgement, even when characters’ actions seem questionable. For example, when Rat Kiley, the platoon’s medic, shot himself in the foot in order to get medevaced, O’Brien depicts the situation honestly and

Instead, he denounces the traditional, dominant war story narrative. Brutal details, according to O’Brien, are necessary, “You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come back talking dirty” (66). O’Brien essentially challenges and warns the reader by suggesting they must be prepared for reality. The soldiers’ experiences serve as a coping mechanism and as a way to honor the men who served. One of these men, Norman Bowker, who was struggling with Kiowa’s death and its affect on him, asked O’Brien to write a story about it. As O’Brien contemplates the memories and the task of depicting this event, he wavers between the significance of writing the factual or the emotional truth, “By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate if from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by investing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain”(152). O’Brien admits how hard it was to truthfully write Kiowa’s story. The guilt and pain he felt as a friend of both men, and the responsibility he felt to write the story as Bowker asked, challenged O’Brien to include