Truth and Memory in the Things They

Truth and Memory in the Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, is more than a novel because it allows the reader to experience the Vietnam War in a personal way and it allows O'Brien the opportunity to bring closure to the entire war experience. Throughout the novel, O'Brien reminds readers he is telling a story and that the story may or may not be fiction. The point of telling stories is not simply to make stories up but to create a passage to peace. O'Brien accomplishes this task with the novel because he allows stories to shape his life and his hope rather than break his spirit. O'Brien proves a good story is a combination of writing well and remembering better.

The Things They Carried is a war novel authenticated through O'Brien's experiences. O'Brien does not simply want to tell Vietnam War Stories, he wants to get something else out of the writing endeavor. Doing so means letting go of all preconceived notions about writing, war, and telling stories. When explaining this process, O'Brien stresses the significance of what the story attempts to say rather than if the story is fact or fiction. O'Brien never wants the reader to forget his wartime experience was ambiguous and as a result it is, "safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true" (O'Brien 82). O'Brien's top concern is not the truth and this is one aspect that makes the novel compelling. O'Brien understands and supports all forms of storytelling, but with storytelling one can certainly delve into moral quandaries and, hopefully, find a way out of them. Nothing is as it seems and, unfortunately, war changes things and people. O'Brien writes:

Something had gone wrong . . . I'd come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person . . . I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason. It's a hard thing to admit, even to myself that I was capable of evil. (O'Brien 200)

Here we see the importance of storytelling for the author. O'Brien is still telling readers a story but he is also validating his experiences and himself with this assertion. War changed him and writing about it brings peace.

The issue of fact or fiction is secondary to storytelling in this novel. The Things They Carried is about writing as much as it is about war with significance on memories. O'Brien reminds us that the man may leave the war but the war never leaves the man. He writes, "the thing about remembering is that you don't forget" (34). This is the same for every memory we have. In short, there is always more to the story. He writes a "true war story is never about war . . . It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow" (85). The stories O'Brien writes are about everything. The most important aspect of his stories is that while they are war stories, they are also stories about displacement. Emphasizing memory, O'Brien reveals how displacement and alienation never actually go away but our minds have a way of dealing with these emotions and one of those ways is through memory and storytelling. From something like war to a childhood friend dying, our memory somehow saves us.

White the writing experience is one that serves to help O'Brien deal with the war in his own way and while the author explains that some of the novel may not be entirely nonfiction, we see how reality makes it way into the novel through the character of Linda. Linda symbolizes the past and how that writing can reconcile that past to a certain extent. O'Brien tells readers that while he cannot save her life he can "steal her soul" (236) in a story. O'Brien wanted to keep Linda alive his entire life but the best he could ever do was revive her with his dreams and stories. Even as a child, he imagined her in rooms and at parties. The adult O'Brien did the same thing, just as he did with Kiowa, Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon. Linda's appearance in the final chapter of the book reveals how we carry many things with us, sometime unknowingly. Linda was with O'Brien during the war and she was one of those dreams that kept him sane. The dead continue to live as long as we keep them alive in our memories. The secret is that we keep them alive for a host of reasons and, in the end, one of those is to bring sanity to a sometimes insane world.