Tim O'Brien “The Things They Carried”

Introduction

In his book "The Things They Carried," Tim O'Brien describes a group of soldiers marching through Vietnam. He does this by recounting the items that each of them carries with him during the march. The things that the fighters convey with them are both tangible and intangible pieces and what these things are depends upon the one-by-one soldier. They convey the basic necessities for survival and the bare minimum to make life as livable as possible. They furthermore convey recollections and fears. The weight of these abstract pieces is as real as that of any personal ones, and different those personal objects, they are not so easily cast away (McMahan, 250).

National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien is well aware of the fate of even the best-received literary novels. "It's very rare that a book will sell even a single copy after five or six years," he said.

This spring, "The Things They Carried" has been sighted on coffee tables and in coffee shops all over greater Spokane. It was selected as the local book for the Big Read, the community-wide reading event sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. O'Brien, who lives and writes in Austin, Texas, will share the stage with Brian Turner, an Iraq war veteran and acclaimed poet. Back in 1990, O'Brien assumed that his book would appeal mostly to readers of literary fiction as opposed to people interested in "a standard war novel" - which it is definitely not. He took big creative risks by inserting a character, a writer with his own name, into the story. O'Brien did, in fact, serve in Vietnam in a unit much like the one he was writing about. Yet he also makes it clear that the story is fictional.

Then he devotes passages to such complicated questions as "What does it mean to say a thing is true or not true?" and "Can a novel tell the truth in a way that nonfiction can't?"

O'Brien said the original 1990 critical reception for "The Things They Carried" was "fantastic," but sales were not exactly Steven King-like. It sold about 30,000 copies the first few years. Then something surprising happened. It began showing up on class reading lists. "It began to be adopted, first by colleges, and then in high schools," said O'Brien. "Now, I hear from so many high school students, I can't respond to them all."

O'Brien said it's hard to find a college that doesn't have it on some kind of reading list. Students pass around their copies to parents and friends, expanding the novel's reach.

Meanwhile, another factor has given "The Things They Carried" new life.

"There are a couple of wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan," said O'Brien. "I think that makes it pertinent to what we're going through today, not just to soldiers fighting the war, but their families as well.”I hear from hundreds and hundreds of people not just from soldiers, but from wives and girlfriends and children, all of whom say the same ...