The Things They Carried deserves its place in the canon of war literature, in this case Vietnam, due to the riveting storytelling. With that said, the novel has an unusual structure and not every artifice of author Tim O’Brien hits the mark.
Absurdity of War
O’Brien is rather self-consciously trying to “say something” about war, ultimately concluding that one cannot generalize. One cannot say war is any one thing, for example, “War is hell.” Through the character Rat Kiley, a storyteller himself, O’Brien reflects on the art of telling war stories:
“The sound. You need to get a consistent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these digressions, they just screw up your story’s sound. Stick to what happened” (107). This writing philosophy seems to suggest a more terse, objective writing style, a la Hemingway, though O’Brien never achieves anything approaching this literary greatness.
Can war stories ever really be true? When O’Brien explores this question so thoroughly, he implies that he himself is an unreliable narrator in The Things They Carried. This, however, turns out to be a weakness in the power of the narrative.
O’Brien’s companions are not particularly noble, as a war story might traditionally call for. Rather, they’re human. They’re macho, brave, but also scared and impetuous. They’re real, and that is the point.
There is a black humor to the soldiers, who joke about death, but there is also O’Brien’s trauma as he describes waking up 20 years later trying to make sense of his experience .
The novel The Things They Carried is an amalgamation of anecdotes and mini-narratives which give one a visceral feel for the Vietnam experience.
The Things They Carried can be likened to Slaughterhouse 5 insofar as it highlights the absurdity of war, along with its pathos.
For example, the beef between Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk: They had promised to kill one or the other should they incur grave wounds on the battlefield. But once Strunk has such an injury, he thinks better of this deal: “Don’t kill me” (66). Further, it is pronounced matter-of-factly:
“Later we heard that Strunk died somewhere over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight” (66). The “weight” he was relieved of was the guilt for not having fulfilled their agreement, that his comrade would have been condemned to life missing a limb. That he died, then, made things more simple.
Death itself is portrayed as a senseless thing. There’s an existentialist perspective in which war and death are meaningless. The war stories in The Things They Carried amount to demonstrations of the absurdity. The lugubrious Rat Kiley cruelly and needlessly shoots a baby water buffalo after his friend is killed in action.
Not Quite Hemingway
Hemingway’s shadow looms large in O’Brien’s writing. One cannot help but compare the two, given the subject matter of their writing. O’Brien suffers in a comparison to Hemingway due to O’Brien’s humorlessness. O’Brien’s just too earnest, lacking Hemingway’s sense of irony. There is humor in The Things They Carried, but it’s in the form of the black humor of the soldiers, but it’s not as though one laughs at any point in reading the book. “Wasted in the waste” a soldier cracks, when one of their comrades is lost in a field of mud which turns out to be a latrine for the entire Vietnamese village. This rises to the level of high school boys’ banter. That was of course in part what O’Brien was portraying, but he never rises above it in terms of his own wit either.
O’Brien also lacks Hemingway’s pathos. That is why O’Brien is a good writer, but not a great one. He has a story to tell, at least, and he does a workmanlike job.
Mary Anne Bell
When Mary Anne Bell, the girlfriend of a soldier, improbably comes to Vietnam, she is transformed into something bestial and lewd. It is the loss of innocence as to represent the US’s loss of innocence in our involvement in Vietnam.
After the shock of the violence she witnesses, which she apparently takes quite cooly, she comes to wear a “necklace of human tongues.”
Mary Anne doesn’t belong in the war, as women didn’t belong in combat. Her presence is like an experiment to see what would happen–which ends in disaster. Having crossed the gender divide, she instead goes mad:
“She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues” (116). For a while, she takes up with the Green Berets. Then, she absconds and is never heard from again, presumably dead.
The Novel’s title is in third person, but the book is in first person, The Things We Carried.
A Leftist Sensibility
O’Brien is maybe too liberal for war, at least this is the impression based on his overly sentimental description of the Vietnamese soldier he killed (130). He almost luxuriates in describing it, as though he were thinking, “This will be good for my novel!” O’Brien even describes his war buddy Norman Bowker as calling him “bleeding heart” in terms of some of his writing. Furthermore, O’Brien admits to a feeling like he’s not meant to be cannon fodder, he’s a little bit special. He was supposed to go to Harvard for grad school. This “preciousness” is a quality to O’Brien’s writing too which is a bit off-putting.
In my opinion, that is connected to O’Brien’s humorlessness. Although the story told in The Things They Carried is compelling, as a writer, O’Brien is too sanctimonious to really employ irony or even humor. By liberal, I don’t mean O’Brien’s political opposition to Vietnam, which is perfectly understandable, especially fifty years later. Rather, I’m referring to something more temperamental.
Hemingway’s shadow looms large in O’Brien’s writing. One cannot help but compare the two, given the subject matter of their writing. O’Brien suffers in a comparison to Hemingway due to O’Brien’s humorlessness. O’Brien’s just too earnest, lacking Hemingway’s sense of irony. There is humor in The Things They Carried, but it’s in the form of the black humor of the soldiers, but it’s not as though one laughs at any point in reading the book. “Wasted in the waste” a soldier cracks, when one of their comrades is lost in a field of mud which turns out to be a latrine for the entire Vietnamese village. This rises to the level of high school boys’ banter. That was of course in part what O’Brien was portraying, but he never rises above it in terms of his own wit either.
O’Brien also lacks Hemingway’s pathos. That is why O’Brien is a good writer, but not a great one. He has a story to tell, at least, and he does a workmanlike job.
Unreliable Narrator
O’Brien is too clever by half in his playing with the truthfulness of The Things They Carried:
“Almost everything else is invented. But it’s not a game. It’s a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I’m thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is” (179). This isn’t as interesting as he thinks it is. It would have been better left to his own ruminations. If the novel is not based on real events, ok. If it is based on his experience, that’s fine too. But to constantly vacillate between whether these events really happened within the novel itself is ill-advised at best, and speaks more to a kind of authorial vanity than anything else.
The one good thing about the structure is when it goes out of Vietnam, into the the present day, as the narrator tries to process his feelings for the war 20 years ago. When he got himself out of that field of waste where his friend died. Yet by this point one cannot have full empathy because O’Brien had already insisted that he’s an unreliable narrator, it might have never happened. This is why breaking that fourth wall was so ill-advised. Our suspension of disbelief is interrupted, and the ability to connect with the story suffers.
Autobiographical?
A reader could connect with a protagonist which is a fictionalized version of O’Brien himself. After all, the narrator and protagonist is called Tim O’Brien in The Things We Carried (though we rarely hear anyone mention his name in the novel, perhaps three times, and more towards the end of the book). But that he keeps insisting throughout the novel that it might not be true complicates matters. If it isn’t true, then don’t name the protagonist after yourself and just make it a novel about Vietnam (informed by your own experience in Vietnam). Then one could suspend disbelief and engage in the novel on those terms. Instead, we’re somewhere in the middle, not sure with whom to emphasize, because of O’Brien’s vain conceit that the novel “might be true, might not be true.”
Hemingway, after all, wrote Farewell to Arms which was informed by his WWI experience, though not as a kind of memoir by any means. It’s confusing as to why O’Brien didn’t just leave it at that, instead of hinting that this may be based on real life–and may not.
When Azar and O’Brien are planning a reprisal on the green medic, Jorgenson, Azar continues on the theme of unreality:
“What’s real,” he said. “Eight months in fantasyland, it tends to blur the line. Honest to God, sometimes I can’t remember what real is” (204). In this context, the unreality of the war situation in such a foreign land, one’s experience not seeming “real” makes sense. The VietCong are referred to as “ghosts,” in their stealthy nighttime movements. But wouldn’t O’Brien’s crew have less politically correct terms for the VietCong? Perhaps O’Brien’s liberal sensibilities wouldn’t allow him to reproduce such terms for The Things They Carried.
With all this said, again, there is great storytelling in The Things We Carried. O’Brien has called the novel “a book about storytelling.” Two of the most poignant sections are when O’Brien decides whether to abscond to Canada, and the ensuing moral dilemma he faces. Another is when he is no longer on active duty with his combat team and feels a sense of separation.
A Classic War Novel
At its heart, though, The Things They Carried is a classic war novel. It has the brotherhood, the machismo, and, especially in the case of Vietnam, the horror. Vietnam seems to hold a special place in American wars for its brutality and its meaninglessness. At no point does O’Brien or his comrades indicate some broader appreciation of their mission–what it is they’re actually trying to accomplish. Instead, they are constantly wandering from one location to the next, hoping not to get killed by VC in the process.
A lot of the novel is O’Brien trying to process the death of his comrades, such as Kiowa, Ted Lavender, and Curt Lemon. The narrator seems to be trying to process their deaths, and what it meant. Surely it was not in the service of a great cause; no such cause is even alluded to.
A Strong, But Flawed Novel
The Things They Carried is a very good novel, but also a flawed novel. Its flaw is in O’Brien’s lack of wit, and in his self-indulgent structuring of the novel, which jumps from event to event. His insistence on being an unreliable narrator detracts from what is otherwise an excellent novel about Vietnam. Finally, there’s something off-putting about his references to himself, as though he’s mightily impressed with himself for having written the novel you’re in the process of reading:
“And then it becomes 1990. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now…” (245)."The structure of the book is fairly self-indulgent. By this I mean the lack of chronology in the narrative structure. Sometimes, O’Brien’s choices work in this regard. For example, near the close of the book, he recounts his childhood crush when he was nine–Linda. Linda dies of a brain tumor. A young Timmy goes to see her body and is unnerved. It’s an well-crafted tale, and written more poetically than the rest of the novel. Moreover, it hits on the theme of death, a subject which clearly haunts O’Brien.
The Things They Carried Legacy
I have noticed that this book is anthologized in high school English textbooks, at least excerpts from it. Tim O’Brien himself expressed his surprise that it ended up as a commonly assigned book in high school and college in an interview with NPR:
“I had written the book for adults. I had imagined an audience of literate people on subways and going to work and in their homes reading the book. But I certainly hadn’t imagined 14-year-old kids and 18-year-olds and those even in their early-20s reading the book and bringing such fervor to it, which comes from their own lives, really.”
This gets to something essential about The Things They Carried: it does have a literary quality, but maybe not as much as O’Brien thinks. As stated above, there is a literal quality to O’Brien’s writing, it isn’t as high-brow as he might have hoped and is therefore quite suited to younger audiences as well as adults.
Grade: A-
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