Department of English
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
The Things They Carried
(1986)
Tim O'Brien
(1946– )
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Notes
"The Things They Carried" was first published in Esquire in 1986.
1 Cross:
1 Chaucer: Geoffrey Chaucer, middle English poet
1 Virginia Woolf:
modern British novelist and short story writer
4 P-38 can openers:
a very small foldable military issue can opener; also called the John
Wayne
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4 R&R: rest and recreation. A 3–7-day leave from the war for a soldier. (Glossary of Military Terms)
4 SOP: standard operating procedure (Glossary of Military Terms)
4 RTO: radio telephone operator (Glossary
of
Military Terms)
4 Bonnie
and Clyde: 1967 film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, about two infamous Texans wanted by
the law: Clyde Champion Barrow and Bonnie Parker
sin loi: Vietnamese for "sorry," "excuse me," "pardon me." In GI slang it's more like "sorry," "that's too damn bad." (See xin loi and Vietnamese Primer)
From "How to Tell a True War Story"
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 the things men have always done.
...
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.
It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.
(O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. 68, 77–78.)
"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.
Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
“Daddy, tell the truth,” Kathleen can say, “did you ever kill anybody?” And I can say, honestly, “Of course not.”
Or I can say, honestly, “Yes.”
(O'Brien, Tim. "Good Form." The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. 68, 179–80.)
From "The Lives of the Dead"
In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By our language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste. Thus, when someone got killed, as Curt Lemon did, his body was not really a body, but rather one small bit of waste in the midst of a much wider wastage. I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. "Just a crunchie munchie," Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body.
(O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998. 238–39.)
A Conversation With Tim O'Brien
Daniel
Bourne: Now that you are looking at the war in that way, how
have you found this terrain of Vietnam a convenient metaphor?
Tim O'Brien: That's mostly how I look at it-though I'm
not sure I'd call it a convenient metaphor. I'd say an essential metaphor
or a life-given metaphor that, for me, is inescapable. And I'm grateful
for it in a sense. I've used it in the way Conrad writes about the sea,
life on the water, stories set on boats, from Heart
of Darkness to Lord Jim,
from Nostromo to "Typhoon" to
"Youth." But Conrad is no more writing about the sea than I am writing
about war. That is, he's not writing about marine biology and dolphins and
porpoises and waves. He's writing about human beings under pressure, under
the certain kinds of pressure that the sea exerts, life aboard vessels,
the discipline of living aboard a ship at sea, the expectations of
behavior that are a part of a ship's life. Lord Jim and his act of
cowardice and so on. Conrad uses the sea the same way I use Vietnam, as a
way to get at the human heart and the pressure exerted on it. He's not
writing literally about sailing and sailors. At the same time, this life
aboard vessels carries with it a framework for storytelling that he uses
beautifully. My content is not bombs and bullets and airplanes and
strategy and tactics. It is not the politics of Vietnam. It too is about
the human heart and the pressures put on it. In a war story, there are
life and death stakes built in immediately, which apply just by the
framework of the story. There is a pressure on characters that in other
kinds of fiction one would have to meticulously build. So, in a way, using
the framework of war is a short cut to get at things without having to
engage in some of this mechanical work that I don't particularly like, to
get bogged down in plotting. I don't like reading heavily plotted stories.
I like a situation to have an instant sort of pressure.
Study Questions
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Review Sheet
Characters
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Lieutenant Cross –
Tim
O'Brien –
the narrator
Mitchell
Sanders –
the RTO (3);
Norman
Bowker –
"carried a diary" (3);
Kiowa – "a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament" (3)
Ted Lavender – "scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April" (4); wrapped up in his poncho after being shot and transported out in a helicopter (3);
Henry
Dobbins –
"big man...carried extra rations...especially fond of canned peaches in
heavy syrup" (4)
Rat Kiley – "carried comic books" (3);
Martha –
Dave Jensen – "practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap" (4)
Lee
Strunk –
draws the number 17 on April 16 and goes down to search the tunnel
near Than Khe before the platoon blows it up (11); he comes up "grinning,
filthy but alive" just before Lavender was shot (12)
Setting
Vietnam
Than Khe –
Chu Lai –
Sample Student Responses to Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Response
1
Responding to the question: Things in the texts we have read are often about non-things. Examine the use of concrete objects or entities in at least two works and show how particular material things acquire meanings beyond their physicality.
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Response
2
Michele Friedlander's essay explicates the metafictional elements in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. This essay was the winner of the East Carolina University English department's 2000 Paul Farr Memorial Essay Contest.
Reference
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. 1990. New
York: Broadway, 1998. Print.
[The page numbers of "The Things They Carried" on this webpage refers to this edition of the story.]
Bibliography of Secondary Material
Bates, Milton J. "Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage." Critique (1987).
Herzog, Tobey C. Tim
O'Brien. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1997. Print.
Kaplan, Steven. Understanding
Tim O'Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
Print.
Zins, Daniel L. "Imagining the Real: The Fiction of Tim O'Brien." Hollins Critic (Hollins College, Virginia), June 1986.
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updated January 8, 2013