The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
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Book Summary Information
Author: Tim O'BrienEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-12-29
ISBN: 0767902890
Number of pages: 246
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of The Things They Carried
Book Review: "The Things They Carried" Truly Carries the Heart of the Readers
Summary: 5 Stars
Tim O'Brien made "The Things They Carried" remarkably enjoyable by narrating powerful stories that embarked on the effects of war and its encounters. This is a novel of interconnected stories that is not part of one central plot. Each chapter describes the experiences of various soldiers and their emotional and mental side effects from the Vietnam War. The novel describes more than just the "things" the soldiers carried; it refers to the burden they carry inside after the war. The soldiers are never once left at peace after experiencing the fear, isolation, and dismay of war. The well structured anecdotes and well written imagery grasp readers through an unforgettable journey. "The Things They Carried" is a beautiful and impressive literature.
What's effective about this novel is the author's style in carrying out his stories in the form of re-telling his memory. The multiple events that are written in the novel are not specific in time or follow a timeline. It is composed of pieces of memories weaving into a novel. In the style of story-telling, O'Brien's anecdotes take the readers back and forth in time observing all the aspect that appears in ones mind as memories. Such as telling the story of a soldier who died, but then he tells another part of O'Brien's memory where the soldier was still alive. The stories do not necessarily follow up on the details after another story end, but to function as memories and telling how certain fear and death affects a soldier in the mist of war at different time. This style of memories does not contain the complete truth.
A major theme that is portrayed in this novel is the "truth" behind every story. One of the most enjoyable chapters to read was "How to Tell a True War Story." The chapter carries out the point to which the author tries to convey. The author's point is that a true war story does not have the complete truth nor does it have morals, but it tells what happens to the soldiers in certain perspective. There are certain truths, but often are tainted from perception and age and are elaborated to make the stories seem surreal. This idea sparks the thought of whether this work of fiction could hide some truth. Whether these memories were actual occurrences or invention of imagination stands on a thin line through O'Brien's stories. Although "The Things They Carried" is a work of fiction, the stories he tell captures the reader's mindset through its authenticity.
Its authenticity is through the stories that develop the character's mental and emotional condition. Each of the members of the platoon unit Alpha Company has a story, a past, and a future that is affected by the experience of the war. The things they carried during the war consisted of tangible objects that represented their position in the platoon and their hope for the future. Following the war, they carried nothing more but the troubling guilt and horrifying memories of fear and death. The things they carried are the consequences of the war for the rest of their lives. For characters such as Jimmy Cross, he carried with him notes which he imagined as "love notes" from his college crush to help him survive. But it was this thought that strayed his attention and caused a fellow soldier to die, thus this incident placed upon a guilt that continued to live on in Cross' mind. Another character is Tim O'Brien who carried the thoughts of murdering people on the battlefield. The imagery in the chapter "The Man I Killed" was horrifying and effective in showing the atrocious side of war. The physical attributes that the character O'Brien described of the victim he killed and the fantasies he created for the victim showed his guilt in killing a boy who was someone and could be someone of potentials. Ironically, in this chapter the author portrayed the beauty of life.
Whether it's hinting towards the beauty of life within the ugliness of war, the author does not fail to get the idea across that soldiers leave the war with burdens. After reading so many assigned books for my IB English class, I finally sat down to read a novel I enjoy reading. This novel is enjoyable for the author's use of anecdotes, style of re-creating memory, and the effects of imagery. The way the story is told is very unique and straightforward. I would recommend this novel to just about anyone.
--P. Tran
Summary of The Things They Carried
One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves.
With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber
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