Please discuss anything that particularly interested you in The Things They Carried. Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:
- Choose a particular story and analyze it briefly. What’s the story about? What’s striking about the language, style, or presentation of character? Why do you think the story works (or doesn’t work)?
- Discuss the form of the book. It’s been classified variously as a short story cycle, as a pseudo-memoir, and as a novel. But perhaps more interesting than what we choose to call the book is how it crosses genre boundaries and subverts readers’ expectations. Why do you think O’Brien makes the formal choices he does? Were you ever frustrated in your reading? What does he gain by such a form? What does he risk?
- Related to the question above, discuss metafiction and storytelling in the book. How is this a book that is about narrative itself?
- Talk about the presentation of gender in the book. Were there particular women characters you were interested in? How does O’Brien’s presentation of gender and war compare to earlier works we’ve read?
- Choose a specific character such as Jimmy Cross, Rat Kiley, Mary Anne Bell, Norman Bowker, Linda, etc. to analyze in some detail.
The Things They Carried uses a unique structure that is difficult to categorize. Much like the nature of the memories it attempts to investigate, the structure of the book itself appears to float between classifications and resists a firm footing in any one category. I understand how it could be a frustrating experience for some readers. It is asking a lot of the reader. Very little is handed over easily. But I find it fascinating. I think the form replicates the way memory functions so well. The reader is asked to consider multiple ideas simultaneously throughout each story. Is this a real story? Is this a recreation of a memory? This narrator calls himself Tim O’Brien. Is that the same Time O’Brien who wrote this novel? Or a character of the same name? Much like how I believe Slaughterhouse Five was the book that Vonnegut was working towards for the first part of his career, I have similar feelings about The Things They Carried. O’Brien is very candid throughout the book that he cannot leave his experiences from the Vietnam War behind. He revisits them again and again. It is all he can write about at times. The Things They Carried feels lucid and natural in its narrative progression but it is very clearly compiled from his career and the product of years of writing from separate periods of his life. He even references characters from Going After Cacciato, the novel that won him the National Book Award. I feel like The Things They Carried is O’Brien’s most honest work. He wrote his memoir that contained his personal experiences. He wrote his award-winning novel that demonstrated his literary prowess and abilities. The Things They Carried is a step further beyond both of those forms to something much more honest and captivating.
I wanted to focus on the scene wherein the character of Tim O’Brien focuses on the man he killed in Vietnam and the meta-fictional role this scene takes on as it is referenced throughout the book. We are told before we learn the context that O’Brien sees on the shore of Canada (in his vision on the lake) the man he kills. We know it is coming, and we know this is the only example of O’Brien killing anyone in the war. On that trail, the logistics appear that he and his squad were hiding in the brush and had orders to kill any armed or suspicious VC that took the trail in the hours they lay in wait. The man was carrying a weapon and some ammunition but also a small amount of rice, his shoes were blown off, etc. I found this a very resonant scene due to the repetitive nature of O’Brien listing the facts and details in his head while being implored upon to move on, to remember that anyone worse would have thrown out the grenade, that the man would have died either way, and that if only O’Brien would talk about it, he would feel better. It ties in so well with his refusal to shake the dead man’s hand which we witness later though the timeline is skewed. It raises the question of truth. When he tells his daughter that he never killed anyone in the war, what are we to believe? This may be the best signifier we have of the difference between narrator Tim and character O’Brien. What is the line of fiction and truth here?
*else, not worse
These are the two stories that moved me the most in this book are: On the Rainy River and the Man I Killed. On the Rainy River pushed the genre limit of a short story and felt more like a personal essay, which was reflected even in his choice of wording: fluid narration, loose structure, conversational language, the vulnerable intimacy… His honesty touched me deeply. There was a clear moral of that story: “I was a coward and I fought. I wasn’t brave enough to turn away from the war.” That relentless introspection amidst drama is what makes the best essay, and it won me over as a reader. The old man at the cottage is also a character I doubt I would ever forget.
The Man I Killed has the feel of a novel in verse, a long poem. The use of repetition not only pins the reader on the scene with the narrator, but also deepens the bond between the corpse of the Vietnam boy soldier and the narrator each time it circles around with each new details revealed. The structure feels stanza-like, poetic; it reminds me of Yeats’ Easter 1916, with that driving line, “A terrible beauty is born.” It was clear that the narrator projected himself onto the soldier he killed in his imagination of the VC boy’s life, his childhood dreams and would-have-been future. The Man I Killed is a deeply moving chapter for me.
Personally, I did not care for How to Tell a True War Story, especially the baby buffalo part. It’s not that I could not stomach the atrocity, although it is quite something to stomach. I felt a strong message from the author, Tim O’Brien, that seemed to say: Because I have witnessed/survived these atrocities, I am entitled. Entitled to what? Entitled to be the true teller the story? Entitled to be the sole interpreter the story? At this point, I can’t pinpoint it without risking to be unfair to the author. But the entitlement is there. I couldn’t miss it if I tried. And it is this sense of entitlement that offends me.
Because of Tim O’Brien’s way of telling the story, and because I am who I am, I don’t find myself sympathetic towards Rat Kiley, who chose to mourn his friend by torturing and slaughtering a helpless, innocent young life, making it into a performance in front of his comrades. Nor can I see why it is a “love story” – I see it as a revealing story of real cruelty in self-victimized men, the image of “punching down” in its most pitiful and putrid form.
It takes tremendous courage to take responsibility in one’s own action amidst, or reaction to chaos and violence. The character Rat Kiley did not have this courage, that much was clear in his dealing with the baby buffalo. Tim O’Brien did not have this courage either. As a storyteller, he let his own nostalgia steal the show. In a story that deals with violence and death, his nostalgia for comradery, his sentimentality for “a love story” is nothing more a rancid distraction to me.
Does the experience of witnessing/surviving atrocities really entitle one to anything? Should it be the reflection afterwards that entitles an eye witness, or is the experience itself enough? Because at the end of the day, I want to ask: What gives the storyteller Tim O’Brien the right to ridicule a listener (“It’s always a woman”, a “dumb cooze”), simply because she was saddened by the baby buffalo and failed to grasp the white male veteran writer’s nostalgia in telling a “true war story”?
What exactly made the veteran writer feel so entitled? The unspeakable suffering he both endured and inflicted in a war that he was “too much of a coward to not fight in” from the beginning?
One chapter that has always stood out to me whenever I read this novel is “How to Tell a True War Story”. Tim O’Brien sets up the chapter to be wholly true and also goes into vague (sometimes even contradictory) details about what a “true war story” is. Near the beginning of the chapter, he states that “A true war story is never moral” (68). He then goes on to say that a true war story “never seems to end” (76). He says this in regards to Mitchell Sanders’ story and his retelling of events that he wasn’t even a part of, but had heard once. At first, Mitchell Sanders tries to find a moral to the story and sums it up as “Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin’. Like the fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody’s sweet little virgin girlfriend” (76). Later, Mitchell seems to go back on what the moral of the story is and just tells Tim to “Listen” (77).
Near the end of the chapter, Tim O’Brien then states that, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth” (83). This line ultimately serves as the crux of not only this chapter, but the entire novel as a whole. While aspects of this novel are not factual, they speak to a deeper sense of truth; a truth based on falsehood and “seemingly true” aspects of war and of life. In essence, something false can reveal a deeper, more meaningful truth about life, war, love, hate, death, etc. than any truly factual event.
Mary Anne Bell in The Things They Carried was insanely intriguing to me, mostly because I wasn’t sure exactly what Tim O’Brien wanted me to make of her and her transformation in Vietnam. When she first appears, Mary Anne is described in an almost ‘all-American girl’ sort of way, “tall, big-boned blonde…long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice cream” (93). Prior to her growing interest in the landscape of Vietnam and the war itself, she is sexualized by the men (even her travel to Vietnam is sparked by discussion of paying for prostitutes to come to the camp).
I was initially put off by his description of her and her use as a distraction from the war. As the first solid female character to appear in the novel, she was reduced to a plaything for the soldiers. Her boyfriend, Mark Fossie, never seems to be bothered by her “coy and flirtatious” nature; in fact, the narrator even says that Fossie enjoys it.
It isn’t until Mary Anne starts showing interest in the war, changing her feminine appearance to a masculine one, that Fossie starts to protest. This initial interest, and the human side that it showed of Mary Anne, began to change my original frustration into admiration. O’Brien (through Rat’s narration) describes Mary Anne’s view of the Vietnamese people as human: “They’re human beings, aren’t they? Like everybody else?” (96). I was hopeful that Mary Anne would then act as a sort of beacon for humanity, bringing some semblance of morality to the camp in juxtaposition with the Green Beret’s also stationed there, who the medics describe as “animals” (92). This hope was short-lived as Mary Anne became fully immersed in the war, beginning to sleep in the Green Beret’s quarters and going out on night surveillance missions. While there is a moment in which Fossie vehemently argues with Mary Anne and she becomes timid once more, it doesn’t last for long. In fact, after this encounter she completely loses any ties to the real world and fully embraces war. “There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it…At the girl’s throat was a necklace of human tongues” (110). Here Mary Anne has embraced the violence of war whole-heartedly, wearing death around her neck with no sense of shame.
Initially this transformation of Mary Anne left a bad taste in my mouth as a reader, mostly because I wondered why O’Brien needed to use a woman to show the most depraved characterization in the novel (in my opinion). However, after some more thought I think his depiction of complete loss of humanity through a woman helps to jar the reader into a full understanding of the transformation taking place.
Had this transformation happened with one of the male characters, perhaps Rat Kiley himself, I don’t know that it would have the same upsetting effect. Men go to war and war changes you; it’s a traditional narrative accepted as an affordable cost. This change happening with a young woman, however, whose very appearance harkens back to the home-front that the men left behind, shows how this change is not normal and should not be shaken off as a natural side effect of war.
I also think that her transformation and her representation of home could also reflect how the Vietnam War didn’t just change those on the battlefield but back in America as well. As the first televised war in American history, people were able to see violence unfolding from their living rooms. While not the same as actively participating in violence, consuming the war in this way also leaves a notable scar, one that becomes blatantly clear in the character of Mary Anne. I would be interested to see if any of the critics focus on Mary Anne’s representation of the home front and what impact her transformation has on the non-military citizens she represents.
I was disappointed with how Mary Anne turned out. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place. It was selfish of Fossie to bring her to war simply because it worked out that he could in a sneaky way. I was almost glad that she got to see it up close so when Fossie got back home she would be understanding and would be able to connect with him more. But then she went off the deep end and couldn’t come back. It is hard to say if she was this person all along, or if the war exposed her to a new world. I was also almost hoping she would have a new respect for soldiers and go home and enlist or something. But always the thought was to go home. She should not have been there, war corrupted her little All-American girl heart and now she is lost forever at 17 years young. What did he tell her parents…
Katie, I was also interested in Mary Anne Bell, and I think you are right that O’Brien’s choice of using a female character to show the extent that war can change people was an effective juxtaposition. One of the critics, P. Smiley, I read for my presentation on The Things They Carried argues that women are not naturally peaceful but rather don’t know how violent they are capable of being. Mary Anne, Martha, and Linda are all potentially latent soldiers more capable than Rat Kiley.
The same feminist critic also contends that O’Brien’s purpose is to help give women a framework for understanding the men in their lives who went to war. If Mary Anne, a mainstream American girl, could undergo such a transformation, it is no wonder that the female’s reader returns from war with trauma.
Something else about Mary Anne is that she is changed as much by the war as she is by the land. Her lighthearted tourism doesn’t last long. O’Brien’s descriptions of Vietnam personify it in a very specific way. I contend that if she had been fighting in a different country, she still would have metamorphized to the same extent, but it would be in a different way.
*no wonder that the female reader’s brother returns
I found your comment incredibly interesting. It seemed to me that Tim O’Brien was going to go in the same direction as most of the other writers that we’ve read and use the sole female character as a “pure” character in the novel or a voice of reason in the war, but then he goes a complete 1-80. I honestly didn’t know what to make of it but I agree with you that he was probably trying to highlight how the fact that war changes people should not be normalized even though it was. I also think that Mary Anne’s character development meant to show that masculinity in war is not the problem–war is the problem and even feminine figures can be negatively impacted and changed. I also think it shows that soldiers aren’t the only people being changed by the war. The war changes everyone it’s linked to, not just the people fighting.
I can appreciate the storytelling in The Things They Carried. I couldn’t tell who the narrator was for the longest time until someone called him O’Brien. Then it clicked. I felt the metafiction in this story was a part of the overall theme of the book. It was his true story, but it was also fiction. The author wanted to tell us his true Vietnam war stories but wanted us to understand that even the truth is not truth in war storytelling. I can imagine, at the moment you see an event unfolding in front of you, you may not see and remember everything that happened. It can happen so fast. In attempting to retell the story, a person may exaggerate some details lost. The exaggeration isn’t a way to lie about what happened, but it may be to fill in some holes as memory sometimes does not serve us well.
And then you have the act of storytelling itself. This is a form of entertainment out there in the wilderness. There is no denying something happened to these soldiers. But belief comes in how you tell the story. Death is hard enough to comprehend and accept. Death with a flourish may make it easier to process. Also, no one else can have those stories. These stories the soldiers tell belong to them. So, if there is truth in it, the details that are lies still help tell the true story.
Like any war veteran who comes home and tries to talk about what happens, Tim O’Brien risks people simply not getting what he is sharing. There are more than enough personal accounts of loved ones or friends trying to get vets to talk about the war. They are not likely to share because the truth may not be what the people want to hear. They may not be ready. So, vets sugarcoat, embellish, or lie to save the people on the receiving end the burden of truth. I believe Tim O’Brien took a risk sharing his stories and the stories of others and that is why I think he had those chapters where he had to explain what storytelling is. He had chapters that explained the truth about their storytelling. To make sure his readers know, there is the truth and there is the truth with some lies, but still the truth.
I noted when I skimmed through the novel when I first purchased the book that on the title page sited “A Work of Fiction.” This declaration was interesting to me because I knew the story “On the Rainy River” was in this collection (novel?) which I read before and the main character was named Tim O’Brien. In this work, O’Brien collapses reality in his fiction. Within the text, he often professes his distaste for “truth” and uplifts the idea of story. O’Brien, ever the postmodernist, proposes there can never be Truth, truth with a capital T. He is one of the factions of postmodernists who suggests that we are post-Truth. I never knew what to expect particularly because O’Brien or the narrator or the narrator who is a fictional version of O’Brien continued to make contradictory declarations about the reality of the story. Throughout the piece, O’Brien makes clear he favors stories, or as he terms “story-truth,” to any kind of “truth-truth.” He states early on, “Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). Ultimately, stories become more true than truth. The stories we tell stick in our memories more than the actual event. Memory is a poor reconstruction of stories we remember. Thus, O’Brien suggests his construction of the war that recreates the emotions that feel accurate rather than are accurate are actually more truthful than the truth. Ultimately, this book reads more like an investigation of the way we tell stories and “preserve” memory than a simple war story.
“His life was now a constellation of possibilities,” (122) writes Tim O’Brien in “The Man I Killed.”
This story stood out to me. It’s a stream of consciousness from the narrator as his mind fills with all the possible versions of the young Vietcong soldier that may have ended when he set off a grenade, killing the enemy soldier. However, the narrator later explains in “Ambush” that “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty” (126). The death of the Vietcong soldier exemplifies some of the same seeming pointlessness of War that O’Brien talks about throughout the novel. His life ends as swiftly as his career as a soldier began, and there is “nothing anybody could do” (120).
The repetitious image of the Vietcong soldier’s eye as a “star-shaped hole” seems significant to me because it represents the narrator seeing the constellation of possibilities staring back at him. This death is just one of them. When Kiowa asks, “you want to trade places with him?” (120), the reader is made aware of how easily the narrator could have been the one on the other end of the grenade. I saw many similarities between the two as well: primarily when O’Brien writes, “he would have been taught that to defend the land was a man’s highest duty and highest privilege” (119), as this same sentiment is instilled in American soldiers. After reading this, I thought back to “On the Rainy River” and how the narrator had two paths laid out in front of him. To flee to Canada or choose to fight. During this challenging decision, he sees a stream of people appear before him from his past, present, and future, even fictional/famous people (56), which seemed like the narrator’s own constellation of possibilities playing out in front of him.
The character of Rat Kelly was very intriguing to me mainly because of the way Tim O’Brien describes his need to expand the truth. Kelly is known as the medic in the group, while also being the one to constantly tell various horror stories and tales to pass the time. I think a good part of his character is adding to the various stories and ways of storytelling. At one point in the novel, Tim O’Brien mentions that truth can vary in that the way a story is told, for the message is the most important part. Even if the story isn’t entirely true, the way the story is told and the moral of the story it’s supposed to teach you matters more than what the real truth was. While spending all this time together, the group of men constantly evaluate their reasons for continuing in the war. They need some type of inspiration. Rat Kelly tells stories about women coming to war and his own experiences to provide a moral compass to the group while also demonstrating the effects of war. While he may not be the most moral person in the group, I think he does a really good job at providing an analysis of storytelling versus truth.
What stood out most during my reading of the novel was the heavy use of symbolism and the larger aspects of storytelling. Rather than describe the characters personalities O’Brien reveals them through physical/literal objects, with an emotional burden underscoring each physical burden; one obvious example of this is Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carrying, and eventually burning, Martha’s photo which in turn mirrors his emotional feelings. O’Brien’s use of both personal and universal physical items to mirror emotional burdens creates a much deeper and complex symbolism on life and war itself.
O’Brien’s blurring between fact and fiction, along with instances of contradictions, throughout the narrative demonstrates the validity and purpose of storytelling along with its role in life at large. The reader’s questioning of what is true within the story illustrates the broader moral dilemma within our reality that holds the quest for absolute “truth” at its center. The storytelling elements in the narrative highlight the absence of such a truth by demonstrating how storytelling both reveals and distorts–events are only stories after the fact.
O’Brien’s use of narrative and symbolism, along with his quotations on the notion of a “true story” (his statement that the truest part of this story is that it contains no moral) underscores the idea that the purpose of storytelling is to relate the truth of experience, and experience is as subjective as storytelling.
We teach this novel in our AP Language course and most students respond in an uproar when O’Brien reveals that the stories aren’t entirely true. Students become invested and are frustrated by the narrator’s so-called betrayal of the reader’s trust. This provides a perfect segway to discuss the importance and nature of a true war story. Both “How to Tell a True War Story” (chapter 7) and “Good Form” (chapter 18) connect in the discussion of what a true war story is – according to O’Brien, a true war story is often a love story that is never moral. The concept of brotherly love and connection is significant in O’Brien’s war story, which establishes the connection between love and war. In “Good Form,” O’Brien casts doubt on the veracity of the entire novel. He does this to force the reader to question what is true and thus, introduces the concepts of “happening-truth” and “story-truth”: both of which work together to form the ultimate truth. According to O’Brien, the “happening-truth” is the raw truth and the “story-truth” consists of the true details. Both of these components are necessary to include in order to create the ultimate true war story. In The Things They Carried, O’Brien provides a space to begin to question the relationship between historical truth and fictional truth. Interestingly, one of the more disturbing scenes consists of the baby water buffalo, which is more disturbing than the death of one of O’Brien’s platoon members (Curt Lemon). O’Brien’s embellishment of details regarding the water buffalo leads the reader to connect more to this scene, which in turn forces the reader to consider the role of storytelling in the perception of war. O’Brien is masterful in his use of storytelling and truth in order to communicate the vast nature of war.