The Things They Carried

“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

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Huzzah. Read, Love Life, Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
Vietnam, alongside war in general, has been absolutely bludgeoned to death by writers far and wide; Tim O’Brien has already taken a few cracks at capturing the foliage-filled steam room masquerading as a country, with varying degrees of success. I guess practice makes perfect. Having Olympic-sized pools of talent probably doesn’t hurt, either. Tim O’Brien’s storytelling has the visceral, poetic grit and earnest candor of a Springsteen lyric circa 1978. He wants to make you feel. Analyzing and higher-order thinking are secondary and tertiary functions; reminding us that we are emotional, reactive animals appears to be a personal jihad of his. The Things They Carried really is art.

The extra-amazing facet of O’Brien’s accomplishment is as follows: most writers only tell one or two stories per book. Few of them do it well. Fewer still do it brilliantly. Only one (that I’m presently aware of) does it brilliantly twenty-two times. I can’t recall being disappointed about a single one of the short stories that comprise The Things They Carried. You’d think that twenty-two `Nam stories would probably be pretty excessive, right? That’s downright sepulchral. I mean, who wants to watch Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, We Were Soldiers, and Born on the Fourth of July back to back to back to back to back, right? Nope. You’d be comprehensively wrong. Bay of Pigs wrong. Not because watching those films would make for an awesome Friday night (they wouldn’t), but because Tim O’Brien looks at life like a lottery he’s rigging for you. The man can flat-out compose, and the flow of his arrangements could procure simultaneous blushes from Rachmaninoff and Martha Stewart.

O’brien’s redefinition of “truth” in literature signifies the cracking of the 23rd egg in his epic omelet of neo-classical literature. He states that “truth” hinges on a “true telling,” and is only achieved if the stomach is made to believe. Despite the fact that he did fight in Vietnam, all of his stories are pure, uncut fiction. Upon discovering this, his point is solidified: not one word felt less grave than before. The meaning was perfectly preserved, because he doesn’t want the reader to know exactly what happened, he wants the reader to know exactly how what was felt during the actual events. War seems to evoke a particular fascination in people that osmoses through anything it comes in contact with, leaving it with a certain aura that demands awe from those who experience it vicariously. That aura, a lucid combination of life, death, love, hate, elation, rage, and whatever other polar emotions the mind can register, is O’Brien’s truth. Your eyes can lie to you. Is what you’re seeing really orange, or do you just think it is because that’s what you’ve been told your whole life? Your ears can lie to you. It takes a tenfold increase in volume before most people think that it has doubled. You can plug your nose and taste disappears. But O’Brien can connect with you on an inalienable level, making you feel the bedrock of your humanity; that was his goal, his truth. Practice makes perfect. Cinco Estrellas.

5 Stars Fantastic War Story
The Things They Carried Book Review

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is an account of the Vietnam War and is told with a mixture fiction and reality. Along with a prolixity of powerful Vietnam tales O’Brien explains the difference between “story truth” and “happening truth”. The Things They Carried obfuscates the importance of “happening truth” and displays the febrile necessity and healing powers of “story truth”. O’Brien’s strong veracity in his storytelling opens reader’s eyes and allows them to truly see what the Vietnam War was really like. The Things They Carried is not a pedagogue story that will put you to sleep but a tale that will be expounded in your mind.

Anything but prodigal is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. This tale of love, danger, guilt, pain, and war can succor anyone in their quest to understand the Vietnam War and what the soldiers endured. O’Brien transgression between first and third person aid in helping the reader analyze what the war was like for not only the character of O’Brien but also the other soldiers. The quote, “war is fear cloaked in coura ge” by William Westmoreland accurately describes O’Briends feelings towards war and what motivates the soldiers. It is impossible not to feel solicitous when reading of the nonplussed protagonist’s confusion towards the war. O’Brien sees only two options whether to succumb to social norms and fight in a war he doesn’t believe in or furtively flee to Canada. Ultimately unwilling to disappoint and embarrass his family O’Brien leaves to fight in the Vietnam War. In addition, O’Brien recalls how unmitigated soldiers he knew had trouble finding meaning in their lives after the war and how one even hung himself. Twenty years after the war 43 years old O’Brien, the Picasso of war story tellers, still experiences guilt. Writing is like therapy to O’Brien and unlike veterans such as Norman Bowker he is able to cope with his painful memories.

Chapter such as “The Man I killed” vivify the iniquities the Vietnam soldiers went through. For the first time in my life I was able to feel sagacious towards their circumstances and could finally see why20the war veterans I know act the way they do. Before I read this story, and I would judge the cold war veteran I know, I had no idea the events and experiences he had been through. However, The Things They Carried opened my mind and helped me be less judgmental and more understanding of a time I have not experienced. The Things They Carried is a literary masterpiece that is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the Vietnam War and its veterans.

5 Stars Stories Can Save Us

I consider a great piece of literature so whenever I find my eyes have glazed over and started to merely move over the written words while I ruminate on something I read on the last page.

Shell shock, Post-traumatic-stress syndrome. It has many names. Few have dealt with it like Tim O’Brien. He wrote a brave and engaging account of some of the darkest moments of war and human existence. He, if not profligated, then at least summoned the fortitude to confront the fears that, no doubt, dominated his life for years.

The Things They Carried is a compilation of stories of the experiences of the members of the Alpha Company Living and Fighting In the Vietnam War. O’brien writes not a reticent word in the novel. He writes a good portion of the book as a personal narrative but writes also, from the point of view of others. Reading the stories, told in chronological quagmire, I couldn’t help but feel an intense desire to see what was going on in O’Brien’s mind.

His is a nebulous method of storytelling. He embarks on several short journeys with the reader to show the truth in war, life, and love, at times seeming discursive, and sometimes also inexplicably sagacious. He never goes far with a central theme, preferring instead to put forth bits and pieces of his company’s experiences and leaving a good deal up to the reader. Instead of bending over backwards to paint a picture for the reader, O’Brien hands the reader a fistful of jigsaw pieces that, may not make a complete picture at all because, for him, the book is more a cathartic volition from the horrors of war than a former soldiers recollection of heroics.

As I read “On the Rainy River”, a chapter of Tim O’brien’s war novel, The Things They Carried, I had just such a moment as I mentioned earlier. I felt as if O’brien told me the story of his struggle with his own ideals and the pressure pushed upon him by those he loved, he showed me a river on which he rowed. He rowed away from his home and from what he thought were his troubles. But his own beliefs felt the lassitude of his guilt and he couldn’t finish rowing across the river to Canada. At that moment my own mind went errant into a review of O’Brien’s. Sitting there, book open, I found myself pondering the more ethereal regions of my own conscience.

5 Stars Good read
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” is the best short story novel I have ever read. It brings a different sort of edge to war stories. It gives the reader something that you wouldn’t expect. O’Brien took the horrible violence of the Vietnam War and turned it into a beautiful flower. O’Brien talks about what makes a “true” war story. He cavils to the argument that only the facts of a story matter. He makes the point that it doesn’t matter whether or not the cold hard facts of a story are true, it matters whether or not the listener feels how the speaker felt at that time. Outlook of specific events change over years, change how you want them to change and exaggerate how you want them to. If some exaggeration is involved, it’s only to get the full effect of the story. He tells several of these stories, some specific facts true, some not true, but all true to him. He talked about what it was like when he first was drafted to the war. What he did, things he never told anyone, and used imagery like a lyrical poet, and addressed the reader as “you” to really get his point across; really get us to feel how he felt that day he was in a canoe at the Canada border bawling his eyes out in front of a man who served as a pedagogue he knew for less than a week. He had been an aplomb college student whose future looked bright, and now he was drafted to the war.

O’Brien talks about the fear they have of the nefarious, ethereal Viet Cong, or “ghosts”, and how different people would cope with the war. Some used tranquillizers to escape the reality, some made light of it by cracking jokes and making horrible situations droll. People would tell unmitigated stories; which would have the opposite effect of making the war opiate. The kind of bond given from being in the war makes a sort of affinity. At a young age he was amorous. He speaks of his nine year old love Linda, who he beguiled, and who was moribund at the time, without his knowledge. The effects of all these stories are powerful, and they leave me thinking about them plentiful. He uses stories as a way to keep the dead alive. It’s similar to Kurt Vonnegut’s “so it goes” theory. People will always be alive in stories. He talks about the man he killed. He uses descriptive text to really paint the picture of how he looked. I can still see him; his jaw in his throat, upper lip and teeth missing, star-shaped hole for an eye. Since I’ve read the description, right now I can still picture the man he was speaking of. It stuck with me. Overall I proudly give this book a review of five stars. Reading this story was never blas