Analysis Essay

Introduction

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien deals with the responsibility, remorse, and the isolation and loneliness soldiers went through the war of Vietnam, chiefly due to the emotional immaturity of the soldiers. It is a work of fiction in which O'Brien "invents and embroiders material based on his own experiences to make himself and his readers feel emotions of hatred, peace, love, loss, horror, confusion, anguish, and wonder". Of central concern to the short story is "how one might reconcile an active role as a soldier with a life entirely separate from that experience".

The paper would carry out the detailed analysis of The Things They Carried and present proper rational conclusions of the same.

Analysis

The Things They Carried is a collection of stories that Tim O'Brien published in the 1970s and 1980s after his return from the Vietnam War. The stories are interrelated and structured such that the collection reads more like a novel than as a set of discrete stories. As a collection, the stories make up the reflections of "Tim O'Brien," a character sharing traits and personal history with the real O'Brien, but one who is careful to highlight the mediated, fictive nature of his writings. A key premise of the novel is that stories are true whether or not they relate "actual" events. In one story, we learn of a character's guilt over allowing a fellow soldier to die, and then we learn that it was actually the narrator who let the character die. After telling us about a man he killed with a grenade, the narrator later tells us he watched the man die but did not kill him, and then follows that with, "Even that story is made up" Each of the stories recounts incidents from the war that try to find perspective in the events and to humanize the men who were involved with the purpose of rescuing them from their deaths. In many ways, the point of The Things They Carried is to examine the nature of storytelling itself and to discover how we use narrative to construct our understanding of events that would otherwise seem random, pointless, and cruel. Themes that inform the novel include cruelty, death, gender, grief, guilt, heroism, innocence and experience, spirituality, and violence.

A true war story, according to Tim O'Brien, is never moral, never able to separate fact from fiction, never ending, never diminutive, never uninquisitive, and never about war. Instead, a true war story is about the things that war is not: "sunlight . . . the way dawn spreads out on a river . . . love and memory." A true war story serves as a healing tool to anesthetize the sting of war. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien has a true war story for every path that he, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, and Alpha Company travel. The purpose of O'Brien's story, which is made up of many smaller stories, is to make the reader think about not just the Vietnam War, but also the aspects ...