Respond to anything in the book that interested you. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Talk about the book’s form. How does it play with audience expectations? How does O’Brien blur fact and fiction? What do you think O’Brien gains with his use of metafictional commentary? What effect did the book’s structure have on you as a reader?
- O’Brien has said in an interview that the tiny kernel of inspiration he started with when writing the book was the line, “This is true.” What does O’Brien say about truth in the book? Is he interested in certain kinds of truth over other kinds?
- Choose a specific story to comment on–why do you think the story’s important? How does it fit into the rest of the collection? What particularly struck you about it?
- Discuss the narrator’s search to understand what courage in wartime means–especially in what many consider to be an unjust war.
- Talk about O’Brien’s presentation of masculinity and femininity in the novel.
- Something said so often about war experience that it’s become something of a cliché is this: “If you weren’t there, you can’t possibly understand what it was like.” Do you think O’Brien believes this? Does the book suggest that he believes trauma can be successfully communicated through storytelling, or does he believe that trauma must be experienced to be understood?
I am fascinated by the writing style of the novel. The word choice is immaculate. O’Brien is intensive, detailed, and … inviting? O’Brian consistently brings his reader in and writes concisely, “Boom, down. like a bag of sand.” then pivots to deep imagery extending moments of death, like Curt Lemon’s, then snapping back to “reality” in a very Billy Pilgrim way, and suddenly announce that the reader “just had to be there.” O’Brian openly and authoritatively questions the idea of story and how narrative is created. I adored how he pushed the effectiveness of language especially when discussing painful human experienced. This strain for the right words, the repetition in order to convey certain effects only to emphasize over and over again, like in Bowker’s story how the need to speak about it bubbles up only to have the narrator cut it short.
The theme of resolution is highlighted consistently. O’Brian effectively makes the reader question what is the “right” way for a soldier’s life to resolve? Is it on the battlefield? Is it with medals? Is it flying back with your family years later? Is it to return to the life you left, enlightened in some way? Is it to die in the bathroom of a YMCA in the 70s? Is it to constantly create and swap narrative of a shared experience in order to confirm that the extraordinary violent things experienced half a world away truly did happen?
Not to get too sentimental, but my husband recently got out of the Navy. When he was fresh out a few months ago, he looked at me and simply said what O’Brien repeats, “You just had to be there.” When I pressed, he stated that so badly he wanted me to be there and to never experience what he went through. That he wishes I was there with in so I can understand everything and more while at the same time he wants me to separate myself and our identity as a couple away from that world. So to read this novel and have O’Brien state that the character have similar wishes for their loved ones or similar struggles in articulating– again by balancing the emphasis of language and the weight and description of sensitive topics, I think bring the emotion out.
One story that I think is crucial is Lemon’s story with the cow. How the treatment of the cow symbolizes so much, but also how O’Brien have the characters say so little but speak so much through their actions: The song, the act of putting the cow in a well, the locations in which Rat shoots the cow. The fact that Rat and Lemon were boys goofing off seconds before the death and yet Rat’s only emotions are in his interaction with cow speaks volumes to the type of mental load the characters have to go through.
How to define The Things We Carried from a narrative point of view might seem a topic open to discussion. At the beginning, I thought it was a memoir recounted from Lieutenant Cross’ point of view, but then I realized it is a sort of collection of short stories revolving around a battalion of soldiers in Vietnam, in which the point of view keeps jumping according to the protagonist of each story. O’Brien himself, in an insightful metafictional intervention, points out that he is disrupting the readers’ expectation of writing non-fiction when he asserts, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (166). And again, ahead in the same page, he establishes the difference between happening-truth and story-truth, in the attempt to demonstrate that, although such a difference does exist, it is irrelevant from a narrative perspective, given that the purpose of his work is having the readers experience what he experienced. I found this concept food for my thought: why should writers be expected to stick to happening-truth in order to give meaning to their work? Does this concept only apply to war writers and historical fiction writers or to all? Like O’Brien, I don’t agree either with that precept. Given that the purpose of literature is having readers feel or experience what writers had, if this effect can be achieved with a hyper truth, or with a fictional truth, then why not? Otherwise, it would be called chronicles instead of literature.
To me, the book’s structure and shifting meta-fictional point of view heighten the impact of the stories and feel integral to the experiences O’Brien is relating —those that happened during the war, after the war, and back in his childhood. The third-person observation, first-person commentary, and fragmentation all work together to create the aura of ambiguity (“it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen”, p. 67; “The angles of vision are skewed.” p. 68) and disorienting nature of war (“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself” p. 78). Using third person omniscient in the first chapter as the characters are introduced and the literal things they carry are listed feels like the wide-angle or panoramic opening scene in a film. In the second chapter, the camera zooms in to a close-up between Jimmy Cross and the author/narrator twenty years after the war. They talk about incidents referenced in the first chapter (and later) and O’Brien discusses wanting to write the book that we’re now reading. The time shifts and repetitive references to certain stories, before and after we see them detailed, moves us through the book much in the way that memory works. We glimpse, we go full in, we forget parts, and others become embellished. We revisit them through different lenses, different moods, different ages. O’Brien basically immerses the reader in the twists and turns of his own consciousness. For me, this was exceptionally powerful.
The story following Norman Bowker’s post-war life, as described in Speaking of Courage and in the following chapter, Notes, stands out in its depiction of the devastation suffered by so many who physically survived the war. Seeing Bowker driving aimlessly around the lake on a beautiful peaceful 4th of July illustrates in high relief the alienation, guilt, and permanent change of outlook/beliefs/desires a veteran of war endures. Because nothing is clear-cut, even despair, O’Brien adds layers to Bowker’s story in “Notes”. He responds to Bowker’s request to write about a character like himself, and fails to tell the “truth” Bowker hoped for. What we’re reading is O’Brien’s attempt to rectify that. What a daunting endeavor writing this book must have been.
Form and the way it shapes Tim O’Brien’s storytelling are central to understanding both the fog of war and its long-term aftereffects. As Lennie notes in her post, the shifting POV and the fragmented nature of the stories are deliberate attempts by O’Brien to recreate the chaos and confusion of war in his readers’ minds. Just like war, nothing in the novel is certain; O’Brien and his characters regularly contradict themselves. In many ways, this reflects the nature of war itself: the Vietnam War was purportedly fought to maintain peace and stability in the world, to stop the spread of Communism. Instead, it took the lives of nearly 60,000 American troops dead and some three million Vietnamese. World War II has been called the “good war” and Vietnam the “bad war.”
To me, one of the most powerful and thought-provoking stories in the novel is “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” The story of Mark Fossie arranging to have his girlfriend Mary Anne Bell visit him in Vietnam is both absurd and completely plausible – just like war itself. Mary Anne’s transformation in the jungle and her training under the “greenies” speaks to the corrupting and soul-crushing nature of war. In weeks, she goes from wearing a pink sweater to a necklace of human tongues. Mary Anne doesn’t have to be in Vietnam but apparently wants to be as it consumes her and she it. “… Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country – the dirt, the death – I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me” (106).
The soldiers of Alpha Company have to be in Vietnam but most don’t want to be. In some ways, Mary Anne is the bravest of all the soldiers because her service is voluntary, and she arrives in the country with no training or equipment. Conversely, the men of Alpha Company talk tough and with bravado, but it’s mostly a show they put on for each other because it’s the only way they know to get through each day.
I really liked the form of The Things They Carried, partially because it reminded me of the episodic structure of HBO’s Band of Brothers. By breaking it up into small sections that carry the story through different voices and lenses, across different spaces and time, the form is a strong method for detailing the immensity of senselessness and pain that the Vietnam War caused. I can imagine that this non-linear approach might have gone against the reader’s expectations, especially since the “truth” as O’Brien presents it is, at times, as unreal and dreamlike as the jungle itself. Also, the lack of a consistent, main narrator felt interesting and clever to me; by departing from the standard singular narrator, O’Brien showed the broader experiences of the war where instead of one man’s recollection, we are shown an “average” of the trauma and terror that people experienced. I think the meta-fiction aspect also helps the idea that there is truth to the narrative; without O’Brien reminding me that “he did this” or “he thought that,” I would be more skeptical of the “truthfulness” of the book, not to say that I would have thought the book was fiction, but that the moments of O’Brien speaking to the reader reminded me that he saw these things and that even if it is not all “happening truth” there is a decided realness to the novel.
In some ways it seems this novel is really about the nature of truth – what makes a “true story”? What makes it true?
The soldiers often seem to be writing their stories as they happen – telling each other what happened, trying to shape, or to make sense of, the world they have found themselves in. They tell each other stories they have heard, sometimes admitting they are not entirely true. For example, in How to Tell a True War Story, Sanders admits making some parts up (“There wasn’t any glee club.”) but insists the story is still true. When things happen to the group, they often tell that story, or part of it, repeatedly to each other – for example, Kiowa repeating how Lavender died. It’s as if telling the story shapes the memory, shapes what happened.
Similarly, the metafictive structure both feels “real”, like he’s reporting what he saw, what he did, but also is used to introduce questions about the nature of truth and stories, such as in the chapter Good Form, with the distinction between “story-truth” and “happening truth”, and when he writes “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.” Earlier, in Spin, Breaking the 4th wall with these statements, he’s prodding the reader to be aware of the reality-building nature of stories. It’s not that the stories feel real because we believe them to be true. We believe them to be true – to reflect some facet of truth – because they feel real. He pushes us, challenges us to consider what we mean by “true story”. How many of these stories happened? Does it matter?
And on another (higher?) level, these stories challenge the biggest story we tell ourselves in democratic societies: what soldiers are fighting for in our name.
After reading the novel, I completely agree with all of the above points. One part that stood out to me while reading occurred on page 36, when O’Brien writes the following: “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a life-time ago, and yet the remembering makes it now” (pg. 36). As Ron notes in his post, World War II was absolutely seen as the “good war” while Vietnam was the “bad war.” Historically, the Vietnam War has left many significant marks on the human population over the years, one of them notably being that this war was essentially the beginning of the official understanding of PTSD. Therefore, this part of the novel stood out to me because it is so profound and true. Although the war has been over for those that were part of it, it is never truly over. The lingering effects of the trauma and catastrophe associated with it will always be present in the minds of those who endured the trauma and suffering that the soldiers and civilians faced. I agree with Melissa’s point as well about the repetition in the novel being associated with shaping the memory of a story. Throughout my read I did find it interesting that there were repetitive instances, most notably surrounding the death of Lavender. In a way, I also think this correlates to the idea of PTSD as well. Those with PTSD often struggle to remember a memory correctly, or have memory distortion which leads to specific details or facts being left out; this could be why O’Brien makes a habit of that repetition, to showcase once again the lingering effects of PTSD and its profound impact on all of those affected by Vietnam.
In the book, I was really drawn to the story of Mary Anne Bell and how she came to Vietnam innocent and touristy and then eventually joins up with the Green Berets.
This is in the short story, “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” She visits her boyfriend, Mark Fossie, arriving as a willowy blonde who wants to sightsee in the village and make-out with her boyfriend. As she stays though, she learns to shoot a gun, chops off her hair, starts wearing different clothing. At the end, she disappears with the Green Berets, and when she comes back, her eyes glow green in the dark. Rat Kiley says, “i didn’t know it was all that complicated. The girl joined the zoo. One more animal— end of story,” (102).
I think that I would like to add her to my research paper on Pearl Prynne (Scarlet Letter) and Merricat (We Have Always Lived in the Castle). She is the third “witch,” defying the patriarchy and living outside of the norm as a powerful woman.
I think perhaps in the books, she symbolizes the corruption of innocence that happened to the young soldiers in Vietnam. I want to dive into the symbolism of her clothes, person, and especially the necklace out of human tongues. She is “othered,” in a place apart, like Pearl and Merricat. She could also be read through an ecofeminism lens as she disappears into the nature of Vietnam.
I am struggling to find sources specifically about her, so I think that it could be a cool possibility.
One thing in particular that really stands out to me in the story is the significance of point of view as well as the individual perceptions of the characters. The very first chapter of the book is told in a limited omniscient point of view and we are very much honed in on the thoughts of Lieutenant Cross. But that dramatically changes once that chapter is over. We learned that the person narrating the story is not a god like figure much like many other third person stories, what is told from the point of view of another soldier who was present during the war time events of the novel. We are learning a lot about Lieutenant Cross and we are also learning a lot about the narrator. In the third chapter of the novel, there is a scene where lavender is under the influence of too much tranquilizer. He then goes on to talk about how the war is mellow and that they are in the midst of a mellow war. Obviously no war is mellow, but because of his perception of everything going on around him in his state, he sees the war as mellow. It is very subjective. And throughout the novel, there are points where we are no longer on the battlefield with lieutenant cross, and we are listening to the writer of the story talk about his experience while writing. He talks about how he is struggling to write it because he feels as though he is reliving the events of the war rather than just remembering it. This reminds me a bit of “Slaughterhouse Five” not just in reference to the similarities in “reliving” the war, but also in that something can exist in a different form. The main character in “Slaughterhouse Five” copes with the memories of the war by saying that just because someone is gone and the past is the past, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or the dead don’t still exist. It’s an alternative view of time. With PTSD however, this might not be a comfort to the characters in “The Things They Carried” like it was to the characters in “Slaughterhouse Five”.
I read this novel (non-fiction novel!?) in undergrad and it was immediately one of my favorites of all time. Upon rereading this time, I was still so surprised how much I enjoyed it and flew through it!
The thing that grabs me about this particular work of his is his style. Every word feels so intentional throughout the novel. Whether that’s because he knew every word would be questioned on whether or not they were true, his use of repetition of phrases and visuals were the most striking to me. The death of Lemon was described so many times in so many ways – but always repeating a phrase, “[Lemon] stepped into the bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining” (70). O’Brien paints this awful, violent scene – describing bits of a person being picked out of high tree limbs, and then balances that with his remembering of Lemon, a beautiful scene, stepping into the light and shining.
This scene was always so striking to me and the epitome of the balance he paints between the violence and those quiet, beautiful moments.