Summary Of The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien

The Things They Carried-Tim O’Brien

“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is a collection of different short stories about American soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War. The book focuses on the turbulent period in the American history where the author narrates the stories with insight and compassion to reach out to the audience. It is almost a hallucinatory book because it is neither O’Brien’s memoir nor a short stories nor a novel but an artful of combination of all these three. In the book, O’Brian narrates his experience in the Vietnam War but majority of the stories are fictional. The main character in the book has similar life experience as O’Brien himself. The author shares the same name with the protagonist in the book. This could

They were both were trained at the Army basic training at the Fort Lewis, Washington and later became regular foot soldiers assigned to work in Firebase LZ (landing zone) Gator, South of the Chu Lai. In the chapters titled “Notes”, and “Love,” the stories are told in flashback of twenty years after the war had ended when O’Brian was forth-three years old and living in Massachusetts as a writer. This indicates that he was writing about his experience in the Vietnam War where he met his two friends Norman Bowker and Jimmy Cross. In some way, his main intention of including them in the book as characters was to inform them that he understood what they underwent while at

According to O’Brian in the chapter titled “How to Tell a True Story,” sometimes people do not believe in true war story because of the unbearable scenes that are impossible to describe. He gives the story of Mitchell Sanders who narrated what they experienced in the jungle while at war. Nevertheless, he later confesses to O’Brian that part of the story was invented/fiction (O’Brian 1011). According to O’Brian, one can identify if a story is true or not by the questions asked afterward. He elaborates that majority of the true stories never actually occurred. The significance of all the true stories is whether you feel it and believe it in your stomach or