Summary Of The Things They Carried 'By Tim O' Brien

Reza Mirza A 4

Real Stories Out of Imagination “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can make myself feel again” (172). In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, many fictional stories take place to show the reader the feelings he had felt in the war. Rat Kiley is the American Alpha Company nineteen-year-old medic. He witnesses the deaths of Ted Lavender, his friend Curt Lemon, and Kiowa and also sees many dead on the other side and has multiple vivid experiences that he likes to share. Rat Kiley plays a central role in the story of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. He combines the theme of “imagination can be more real than reality itself” through his burden of death, stolen innocence, and his need to tell stories.

Rat Kiley as a young soldier had never experienced things as serious as the Vietnam War and so has a rude awakening there that changes him a lot. In the chapter, “Night Life” Rat Kiley says, “And the thing is, it doesn’t scare me.More like curiosity. The way a doctor feels when he looks at a patient, sort of mechanical, not seeing the real person, just a ruptured appendix or a clogged-up artery” (211). Rat Kiley is shocked by his loss of innocence in the Vietnam War, thanks to the many scenes that he witnessed. He starts to imagine things such as cut-out organs and sees pictures of how his comrades would look dead; all of this is connected to the horrific scenes and deaths he witnessed. He used to be a kid playing around with Curt Lemon when Lemon got blown up into the tree and he is conflicted about himself trying to deal with that. Rat Kiley recounts Mary Anne saying, “The way she looked, Mary Anne made you think about those girls back home, how pure and innocent they all are, how they’ll never understand any of this in a billion years.It’s like trying to tell somebody what chocolate tastes like” (108). This quote by Rat shows how he has grown from being a “pure and innocent” boy in America to being a grown,

Rat has an urgent need to tell stories to ease off things such as his burden of death and embrace his childish nature. His stories might not be true, but they are important because they help make life better and more real. Rat's way of storytelling is recounted in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” by saying, “It wasn’t a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt” (85). Rat Kiley does the same as the real Tim O’Brien by adding to the truth to make the reader/listener feel what he feels. Tim O’Brien wrote this fictional story to allow the readers to understand how the war was for the people who fought in it while using the character of Rat Kiley to show how Vietnam can bring out the darkness in a person such as Mary Anne and Azar and how it prompts imagination that can make the reality even scarier and real. The book then narrates, “For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying