Things They Carried Tim O\'Brien\'s

Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien's the Things They Carried, while presented as such, is not a true war story but a post-war story. The narrator intimates this himself, in a moment of suspicious candor, when he relates that the chapter "Speaking of Courage" could not be included in an earlier novel, Going After Cacciato, because that novel was a war story and "Speaking of Courage" is a post-war story. "Two different time periods, two different sets of issues. There was no choice but to remove the chapter entirely," (O'Brien, p. 159). It is then, from this post-war perspective that the Things They Carried must be understood, from the perspective not of a soldier deep, alone, and harrowed in the bush, but from the perspective of a veteran deep, alone, and harrowed in his memories and past experiences. For O'Brien, fiction and imagination -- storytelling in specific -- is a coping mechanism used to overcome the horror of the field and the truth of war, as well as, and most importantly, the fact of death. The Things They Carried, then, is a post-war story because it is an attempt not just to share war through fiction, but to cope with it through that fiction and sharing

In "Good Form," O'Brien intimates that the hard facts of the story he is nearly done telling are unreliable. By the chapter's end neither the reader, nor Kathleen -- O'Brien's daughter who is, symbolically, a sort of meta-reader -- nor, perhaps, even O'Brien himself can accurately say whether O'Brien really did kill a man outside of My Khe or whether those facts were embellished. The facts themselves are not important, though: "story truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth," (O'Brien, p. 179). The message is clear, then: to O'Brien there was no question of relating a literal war story but of sharing story truth because

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again (O'Brien, p. 180).

And, through story truth, what the story is able to do for O'Brien, it becomes able also to do for the reader.

In "The Lives of the Dead," O'Brien further elaborates on his need for stories universally. Through make-believe -- imagination, stories, fiction -- O'Brien finds that he can not only resurrect the dead but also lay a barrier between himself and death. His response to the death of Linda is a retreat into imagination, just as the response of the soldiers of Alpha Company to the corpse of the old man by the pig pen is to engage in an elaborate game of make-believe: "It was more than mockery" (O'Brien, p.227). O'Brien's distress as the bizarre ritual unfolds is related to his inability to participate in the imaginative fiction occurring, through which the other soldiers cope. "It was my fourth day, I hadn't yet developed a sense of humor," (O'Brien, p.226). Similarly, O'Brien is able to cope with Linda by engaging in imaginative fiction -- her death is mitigated, as are the deaths of Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon through the imaginations and story telling of Alpha Company.