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Classic Literature. Fiction. Short Stories. HTML: A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere??from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing??it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award… (more)
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This book is about death. It is about life, love, courage, cowardice, and compassion, but it is mostly about death. Real death. Limbs missing, organs, blood, an empty star-shaped hole where an eye used to be, jaw bone down in the neck, bloated, stinking, real death. Curt Lemon standing in shadow, slowly stepping sideways into the sunlight. One second he is alive. The next second he is in pieces hanging off the branches of a tree. Lemon tree.
I was in the military. I was fortunate enough to never see combat. The most dangerous thing that happened to me was being chased by a wild boar through the woods of Denmark. Or maybe the most dangerous thing was being chased through the streets of Bremen by a drunken German girl with pink hair. But I wonder how many of my friends later had to go to Iraq or Afghanistan? How many of them were killed? How many of them were turned into lemon trees?
In the last story of The Things They Carried, O’Brien writes of being in love when he was nine years old and of his girlfriend dying of a brain tumor. Linda, O’Brien’s nine year old dead girlfriend, tells him what death feels like:
‘“Well, right now,” she said, “I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.”
“A book?” I said.
“An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”’
In his stories, O’Brien brings the dead back to life. He makes them sit up and speak. He makes them go trick-or-treating. They go ice skating. They ask you what is wrong. Why are you crying? And in a sense, O’Brien is pondering life after death. He seems to hint that he doesn’t believe the Christian notion of life after death, however he clearly wonders what happens. That people’s lives can’t just go away. Souls don’t just evaporate.
And isn’t this what we all think about, or try not to think about? What is it going to feel like? Or will it be just black emptiness? Or pain? Or celestial angels? Or rebirth? It is the one thing that we all have in common. We will all die. Every single one of us. And what is worse, all of our loved ones will die. All of them. There is no story that will make that sound any better. What these stories do accomplish is making us reflect honestly on death. We try not to be timid. We try not to be sentimental. But isn’t it only natural?
Tim O’Brien is a master storyteller and a brilliant writer. I look forward to reading more of his books.
An apt review for Veteran’s Day.
Tim O’Brien is quite a storyteller.
The stories are heartbreaking and reveal the depth of despair that one of the worst times in our country’s history brought about. It should be required reading for all those who serve as president or congressional member, those people who make the decisions to send boys to war; those who choose to put lives on the line while they rest comfortably at home. The stories also reveal the camaraderie apparent in the relationships between these brave soldiers. If we can’t learn from these experiences we’re bound to make the same mistakes, over and over.
The characters are all well-drawn and show great depth and the almost two dozen interrelated and interwoven stories that comprise this book, are incredibly well done. Some will tear your heart out. Some will make you smile. Some will fill you with amazement and wonder. And anger. The first (and title) story The Things They Carriedhad enormous impact and set the stage for what was to come and introduced, intimately, the characters:
”The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes. Military Payment Certificates, C rations…Most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was always loaded.” (Page 4)
As you turn the pages and get to know the members of Alpha Company, you realize you are in the hands of a master storyteller and for him it’s all about the story:
”Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” (Page 38)
And as a reader, what more could you want? Very highly recommended.
I have this hang-up. I like meeting authors. I get sad when I think about how I never could convince my school (in Indiana) to get Vonnegut to visit. And now it's too late (and I live in Texas!). But, I love meeting authors. And I would have loved to meet O'Brien.
Granted, it's not too late. I just don't have very many opportunities for meeting authors, so I try to take 'em as I get 'em.
But, why would I have wanted to meet O'Brien? Well, if you've read The Things They Carried, you might want to meet him too. Or never meet him, and constantly be fleeing from him. Either way.
The Things They Carried is a war book. It focuses on the Vietnam war, both in Vietnam and in the US. It's satirical, but it's also moving, as if Heller were covering a different war, but keeping it toned down from time to time.
I enjoyed this book, and found it to be very readable, and quite enjoyable. At times, there'd be a long stretch of dark or deep or depressing events, and then one of the characters would say something off-color, breaking the somber mood, causing me to laugh out loud. From what I've heard about O'Brien's comments on this book, I really, really, really kick myself. I'd love to hear them in person.
But that didn't keep me from enjoying it, and shouldn't keep you from doing likewise.
This book definitely left me saying "Oh", and "Wow", as well. I'm not typically one for war stories, but this one is so powerful and moving that when I was finished -- and often between chapters -- I just sat and thought. O'Brien's novel is fiction posing as a memoir, telling the stories of the men in his company as they fought in Vietnam, telling the stories and the truths of war. Just about every chapter is its own story, but they weave together to give a larger glimpse into the lives of the men who battled both the enemies and themselves.
Three-quarters of the way through the novel, O'Brien tells us, "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth." (pg. 179) The Things They Carried may not be the truth in the strictest sense of the word. These stories may not have happened exactly as O'Brien put them to paper, but they're beautifully written, touching, and emotionally true.
Using non-linear narrative and stringing
Here's what I love about this book.
O'Brien was in fact in Vietnam, and the experience has informed his writing ever since (his first book was If I Die in a Combat Zone). There's a very blurry line in Vietnam war lit between fiction and nonfiction. Many young men returned to write one book. Only one. The way that many young authors begin their work with a coming of age story, but in these cases, it was the only story they had to tell.
Vietnam WAS horrible. Horrible. And there aren't any books written by combat vets about the experience that make it seem like they came away from the experience as better people. You get that gloss on the movies about Vietnam at times, but those movies I can do without.
The Things They Carried is about what you do with an experience that is so horrible that you can't come home and tell your WWII veteran father about it, you can't tell your girlfriend about it, you can't tell your mom about it. Yet when you leave the war zone, you're still in the neighborhood of 20 - 22, assuming you were drafted, which is a decent assumption.
What do you do, how do you process an experience that is utterly foreign not only to the people you care about but also to yourself?
How do you process *any* experience? By telling stories about it. You can tell the stories from various perspectives. You can change details here and there so that the worst stuff gets talked around but not about. You can hint to your audience where your worst pain lies.
Notice that in several instances the same story is told with different endings. That's important to the way we think about the book.
Notice the chapter called How To Tell A True War Story. Think hard about what he's doing there. Think about whether his statement about making stuff up or adding stuff so that it won't be "boring" is ironic.
Read the chapter where the guy is driving around the lake at home. Read it more than once. Maybe read it aloud to yourself. There's a lot in that.
I love this book deeply. It's okay with me if you don't like it, but if you don't like it because you don't understand what he's doing, then I would feel bad for not speaking up.
You should know that for a number of years I avoided Vietnam lit because I figured it had nothing to say to me. My brother served during the Vietnam war, but stateside. I knew no veterans (at the time). I thought it just wasn't my issue.
Then I read two books that showed me what Vietnam lit could add to my life. Interestingly, neither was written by a vet. They were: The Names of the Dead, by Stewart O'Nan, and In Country, by Bobbie Ann Mason. All of a sudden I could see that Vietnam war lit had a LOT to inform my life. Think about what it means to be a young man, generally not very well educated (college students were exempt from the draft), suddenly in a completely unknown place fighting an unknown enemy. In many ways, that's a metaphor for young adulthood just as it stands. But this is real. Real bullets.
So given that I think first books and coming of age stories tend to be very revealing as part of a culture's zeitgeist, I think any story about the Vietnam war, true or "fiction", can give us really important insight into our own thought processes and the manner in which we approach our own lives.
There’s a lot going on at the meta level. The author inserts himself into the book as a character, and indeed, much of the material is of the memoir variety. But much isn’t. Moreover, he dedicates the book to his fictional characters. One of the main points he makes, both implied and explicit, is that with storytelling, there is no clear line between truth and fiction:
"…a true war story does not depend upon … truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
What matters, he writes, is that stories bring the past into the present, and make remembering eternal “when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
Stories are a way to cheat death, he observes. In one of his dreams, he asks a childhood friend who died of cancer what it was like to be dead:
"For a few seconds she was quiet.
‘Well, right now,’ she said, ‘I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading. . . . All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”
The war O’Brien describes is not pretty. As he observes: "War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
Discussion: This piercing and devastating book raises questions about the ambiguous morality of how best to cope with nightmarish options; the driving force of fear of shame, which causes men to kill and to die; the bizarre combination in war of mind-numbing monotony with the most intense affirmation of being alive you can ever have; the question of what really constitutes courage on the field of battle; how eerily beautiful war can be, even if the beauty stems from horror; the incredible feeling of belonging, kinship and brotherhood achieved by war; and the deep, dark feelings of loneliness and isolation that descend like a black cloud when that bond is severed and you go back to a society that could never understand what you went through, and moreover, doesn’t want to know.
Evaluation: Powerfully awful, but powerfully good.
I couldn't endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just twenty yeards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was.
...
...to Vietnam where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war.
O'Brien is merciless in his description of war and its effect on people, and on its true meaning, while at the same time showing a deep understanding and sympathy for the men, boys almost rather, caught up in life-defining, and often soul-destroying experience.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. It at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is not rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
The vocabulary and the sentiment recall strongly Wiflred Owen's great poem, Dulce et Decorum Est which describes the effect of a gas attack ends with:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you wold not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The book is a series of stories, about O'Brien and his platoon mates, what they did, how they lived, how they died, and how they tried to adjust to life back in the States for the those who survived, forever marked by their experience, some much more than others.
O'Brien on war:
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil–everything. All around you things are purely living and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. Your feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self–your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you are a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though its odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk, you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the rive, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
Interesting that O'Brien says that upon his return to the States, he never spoke about the war, at least not in detail in ordinary conversation, but that every since his return,
I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I'd allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I'd make, all the terrible things I had seen and done.
Not unlike the compulsion to tell that obsessed Primo Levi when he returned to Italy from the camps.
At times I forget that most wars are fought by the young. The boys in this book were, in many cases, not even in their twenties, and their immediate leaders were only a year or two older. As an older woman, looking back on this, and thinking of all the other boys that are serving their countries even today, I feel such compassion for both them and their families.
Tim O’Brien, like so many others, has been haunted by his experiences in Viet Nam, and I hope by penning this fine memoir, he has been able to lay some of these ghosts to rest. I would recommend that anyone who wants to get a real feel for what Viet Nam was like for American soldiers that they read both The Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
This book hit home a little for me. I have never experienced war personally but my dad was special forces in Vietnam, POW/MIA and all that. I am the world's biggest daddy's girl and I kept imagining my dad in those situations. It made me think a lot about all that he, and countless others, had to go through. My dad is the most patriotic person you will ever meet and he always instilled in us deep and profound respect for the members of our armed forces. This book only helped to solidify that respect. I couldn't imagine having to go to war like that but I am damn grateful to those who did and those who are still fighting. So, I'll take a second to give a big Thank You to all our servicemen and women.
Obviously, I'm giving this book a big recommendation. Pick it up! Plus, at a mere 230 pages it's a quick and easy, yet compelling read.
Well, it made me think anyway. It made me think about peace and war and what it would be like to be drafted. It made me think about soldiers and brotherhood and sacrifice. It made me think about the lengths that one might have to go to survive in a war—to
“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.”
Tim O’Brien is a phenomenal writer. Had I been reading this on my Kindle, I would have been highlighting every page. As it was, I practically read the whole book aloud to my husband because I just loved the way that O’Brien put his words together. There’s this gravity to them that makes you sink into yourself and really feel the weight of his stories. Most of them are brutal and painful and just plain awful. Some of them are bittersweet. And while all of them are fictional, thus making them not true, they all have a truth to them that’s almost devastating.
“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
I did. I felt it, and it moved me to tears. In fact, I may or may not be misting up right now as I write this. That’s the kind of impact this book had on me. Because this wasn’t just a book about war—if that’s all you take away from it, as the author says, you weren’t listening. It’s also about trust and friendship and love. It’s about remembering the good stuff in spite of the bad. It’s about keeping the memory of those who were lost alive.
“And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
At 246 pages, The Things They Carried is a quick read and it’s one I’ll not soon forget. It’s probably not for everyone, but then again, neither is war. I recommend reading it anyway. Step out of your comfort zone. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Help carry a bit of the weight, because remembering is a burden that one should not have to shoulder alone.
This is an incredibly powerful book and one that I highly recommend.
The writing is crisp and clean with vivid images. While each chapter can stand alone, the tapestry of all units together becomes a quilt that
The end product is a gripping tale of what was carried along with the ammunition -- including guilt, terror, machismo, bravado, tears, fear, comradeship and a longing to be anywhere but the Godforsaken place called Viet Nam.
Second, I would argue that although the stories are set during the Vietnam War, which is almost secondary to the author's intent: to discuss the interplay of truth and story in an attempt to find the meaning of memory. Now obviously, the setting has a great deal of personal meaning for O'Brien as a vet, and some of the stories are very much about the war. My favorite of these is the title story, "The Things They Carried". But a large number of the stories are more about the process of telling war stories, and personal narratives in general, and how truth is not a thing to be achieved, but that it comes about as a result of a conglomeration of stories. Like the book itself (a collection of stories), any truth the reader might glean is a result of the stories, not a nugget of knowledge held out as a historical truth.
Which leads me to my third reflection, is The Things They Carried historical fiction? Parts of the collection appear to be personal narrative, but then the author says in "Good Form":
It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.
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. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present.
But listen. Even that story is made up.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
(emphasis is author's)
The separation between author and narrator is as nebulous as the "story-truth". So if we can't even take the author's word for what is his experience, the book moves beyond personal narrative into fiction. So why do we read historical fiction at all? There are so many personal narratives from the war that have been written that would surely get closer to the "happening-truth". Is historical fiction simply a way to remove oneself a bit from the horror? Is it simply easier to read books like this, perhaps better called a series of essays, or is there a "story-truth" that trumps the "happening-truth"?
Edited to eliminate touchstone numbers.
This book is fiction, but only loosely qualifies as a novel: A character named “Tim O’Brien” recalls the poignant and sometimes harrowing events that took place before, during, and after his tour of duty in Viet Nam. It may or may not always be the story that reader wants read, but it is clearly the story that the author needed to write. It is also one that just blew me away.
The rest of the stories were also well done and moving (except for one that I didn't care for).
No, it was not a war he agreed with, not a
The lyrical beauty of O'Brien's prose made me cherish the images of war in ways that I would never have thought possible, while at the same time, making me a more solid hippie. As he describes the scene of a young man, "one eye closed, one eye a star shaped hole," I was taken to the path, taken into the head of the soldiers dealing with this image, taken into the grit that can both scar and create a new man. Being exposed to the brutality of death, the coping mechanisms employed in order to deal with that death and gore, I am grateful that I will likely never have to become one of the soldiers for whom this is personal history.
But (and I'm sure you can tell what's coming here since you know I gave it five stars) I started on the
The Things They Carried is a short story collection joined at the seams by a single subject: an army troop in the Vietnam War. These stories give voice to the troop's men, and follow their feet, joys, and griefs through the explosive terrain of Vietnam. What I like is that the story is never preachy; you never feel like the author is trying to Make A Point About The Violence of War. It simply is what it is, and what makes it more interesting is that Tim O'Brien is also a character in the book, though the book is supposed to be fiction, thus blurring the line between truth and reality.
But even if you have no interest in the Vietnam War, read this book for the simple love of writing and for its beautiful depiction of the human condition.