Preferential Perspectives In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Spencer Christensen Amanda Aldridge ENG 102 02 May 2024.

Preferential Perspectives in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried: The morality and events of the Vietnam War will always be a contentious and solemn topic. Over the decades, countless forms of media have discussed or portrayed it, with varying degrees of truthfulness and respect. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is ambiguous in the former and perhaps overindulgent in the latter. The novel comprises multiple connected short stories concerning events O’Brien may or may not have gone through during the Vietnam War, and it examines the war and the men involved through a philosophical, moral, and emotional lens. However, in exploring these elements of the war and morality through the

If The Things They Carried is known for one thing, it is a depressing anthology of war stories. If it’s known for two, the second would be the constant ever-present pondering as to the truthfulness of the stories. O’Brien, in a claimed effort to get the reader to understand the truth of what he felt instead of what he experienced, made the events of the novel ambiguous as to their truthfulness. This is a nearly foundational element of the novel that permeates throughout the entire book, sowing the first seeds of uncertainty in “How to Tell a True War Story” where the idea of story-truth being more accurate than happened-truth is introduced through Rat Kiley, and culminates in “Good Form”, where O’Brien explicitly says his story of killing the Viet Cong man is false. The concepts of courage and heroism are dwelt upon in certain parts of The Things They Carried, and the novel makes the two ideas gray instead of black and white, smearing the hard-line definitions seen in classical stories, making the characters seem heroic or courageous in one story and immoral and cowardly in the other. The book expresses this blurring of the lines in such a way that makes the characters more