War is one of the most complex yet completely understood subjects to read or write about. Tim O’Brien has captured the true essence of being drafted into a war. “The Things They Carried” is a novel composed of multiple short stories; Each taking the reader through the perspective of the narrator showing his multiple landscapes, situations, and changing feelings from being drafted into the Vietnam War to surviving it. These stories really help one understand the effects of war on someone’s mind as well as body. Tim O’Brien is the main character and protagonist in this novel.
Tim O’ Brien’s book ‘The Things They Carried’ is a series of stories about the Vietnam War. Although all chapters in this book are related to the Vietnam War, each story transmits a different message to the readers and is narrated in different ways. In this essay, I have analyzed two stories to find the themes of each one and through what they are expressed. In “How to tell a true war story”, the author narrates two stories of the men in the Alpha Company and throughout the stories he disputes whether they are real or fabricated. On the other hand, in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, Rat Kiley tells the story of his first assignment in the isolated mountains of Chu Lai.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, is an emotion provoking collection of short stories about the Vietnam War. One of those stories, The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong, is about Rat Kiley, who had the reputation of “heating up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt” and that quality is displayed in his account of a girl named Mary Anne. In Rat’s story, Mark Fossie, a medic, flew in his girlfriend, Mary Anne, to Vietnam where she gets enveloped and changed by the excitement of the war. Rat Kiley created the story of Mary Anne to characterize changes that happen to all people who go to war. Rat also highlights the idea that we have “these blinders on about women”.
And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’” (77). We can never assume the truth in a war story. The only way to discover the truth hidden behind the lies is to pull away the many layers or in this case the stories that make up a war
When listening to a war story, gruesome details are expected. They are expected to be sad and terrifying yet ultimately interesting to hear. When listening to a war story, it is expected to be true. Tim O’Brien offers a number of different stories from the Vietnam war in his collection of short stories, “The Things They Carried.” In his short story, “How to Tell a True War Story,” he informs his audience that in telling a story from war, the truth becomes irrelevant.
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83). The theme of “happening-truth” versus “story-truth” is a constant opposition Tim O’Brien uses to convey his “true war story” to his audience. Many times in the book The Things They Carried, O’Brien lies to the reader to attempt to give the reader realistic events, so they can relate to the emotions O’Brien felt during the Vietnam war. O’Brien makes it clear in the chapter “Field Trip” that a person who has not been to war cannot comprehend what it was like. He uses a fictional character, Kathleen, to be a stand in for the reader; she is innocent and free from the burden of serving in wartime.
“The worst affected from corruption is the common man” Kailash Kher. In a collection of short stories, Tim O’Brien writes about his horrific experiences during the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried. He recounts the graphic details of morbid ordeals he and his platoon encounter. They are forced to undergo extreme situations where they murder hundreds of Vietnamese and suffer loss. Overtime, the soldiers suffer mentally and face the consequences of their actions.
Readers, especially those reading historical fiction, always crave to find believable stories and realistic characters. Tim O’Brien gives them this in “The Things They Carried.” Like war, people and their stories are often complex. This novel is a collection stories that include these complex characters and their in depth stories, both of which are essential when telling stories of the Vietnam War. Using techniques common to postmodern writers, literary techniques, and a collection of emotional truths, O’Brien helps readers understand a wide perspective from the war, which ultimately makes the fictional stories he tells more believable.
In the novel The Things They Carried (1990) and in the TED Talk Why veterans miss war (2014) Tim O’Brien, a critically acclaimed veteran and writer, and Sebastian Junger, an American war veteran and journalist, respectively claim that “brotherhood” is an important factor of war, therefore contributing to why some veterans miss the war when they return to civilization. O’Brien elaborates on his belief by apprising a tale of a lieutenant who faces trauma after his soldier dies (it wouldn’t help Lavender, but from this point on he [Lieutenant Cross] would comport himself as an officer) along with Junger who tells an anecdote of his friend, Brendan O’Byrne, who “realized he couldn’t protect his men when one of them was hit by a bullet and that
In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the author retells the chilling, and oftentimes gruesome, experiences of the Vietnam war. He utilizes many anecdotes and other rhetorical devices in his stories to paint the image of what war is really like to people who have never experienced it. In the short stories “Spin,” “The Man I Killed,” and “ ,” O’Brien gives reader the perfect understanding of the Vietnam by placing them directly into the war itself. In “Spin,” O’Brien expresses the general theme of war being boring and unpredictable, as well as the soldiers being young and unpredictable.
For the final paper, the topic I will pursue is ‘Getting to Know the Truth!” Using the book “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, I plan on making an analysis of truth. In the paper the importance of both the happening truth and the story truth and the difference between them will be concluded. From there, a conclusion of which truth is most important will be made. Along with analysis of the pervading truths and the Greek quote by Aeschylus.
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is stories centered around the American soldiers in the Vietnam war. O’Brien explains how the harsh atmosphere of war can mentally and physically traumatize a soldier. In order to escape this atmosphere some men fantasize about the women they love. The men do not think of the women as people with their own thoughts and feelings, instead they think of them as forms of comfort or motivation for survival. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and Mark Fossie profess to hate the women they love because the women do not fulfil the fantasies the men have created.
In The Things They Carried, the author and narrator, Tim O' Brien seeks to go beyond simply telling the stories he has to tell about his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. He wants to tell the audience a true war story, and dedicates a chapter, aptly named "How to Tell a True War Story," to giving the reader a better idea of his idea of how a war story should be told. O'Brien's recounting of the story of the baby buffalo epitomizes his view of telling a war story by implementing the concept of blurring truth and fiction which recurs throughout the book and exemplifies how it could enhance the reader's interpretation and understanding of the events and ideas that the author wants to convey, which go beyond a simple retelling of a war story,
His purpose in writing this novel was to help readers understand what was going on in the Vietnam war. Tim O’Brien uses themes storytelling and shame/guilt to help people who wanted to know about the Vietnam war understand how the soldiers felt. In the chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien uses the theme storytelling to show that a
As O’Brien narrates his novel with these imaginative stories, he implements a series of deeper meanings behind every story, telling another story or truth beyond the initial story. “As a result, the stories become epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the ways of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and visions” (Calloway, 249-250). O’Brien’s stories become differentiation between justified truth or opinion and create multiple perspectives to engage the reader into a process of imagination to determine what is true. As O’Brien carries out the novel, it doesn’t center around a “true war story” or “historical document,” but combines the concepts of fact and fiction in order to distinguish what is true and what it means for a story to be declared true or not, as well as the relevance of a story being told. “If the epigraph reads like an attempt to authorize the fiction in order to write history, O’Brien’s narrator also makes liberal use of history to develop and organize the fiction” (Silbergleid, 129).
