The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief,
terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their
own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried
shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice....
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics
Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of
demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the
memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato,
and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor
collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three.
Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested
in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he
depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things
They Carried plays with truth.
The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that
many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened.
He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in
"Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing
never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the
character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the
Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the
company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice
between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never
drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian
shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the
bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the
truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the
experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both
considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things
They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it
is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his
book (and the Vietnam War) unforgettable.
The stories do involve a lot of graphic imagery, violence and some
profanity, none of which ever feel gratuitous. If you are disturbed by that,
then this book may not be for you, but I would strongly suggest to anyone
else that this book is worth experiencing.
/tdw/
Tim O'Brien
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief,
terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their
own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried
shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice....
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics
Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of
demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the
memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato,
and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor
collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three.
Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested
in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he
depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things
They Carried plays with truth.
The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that
many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened.
He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in
"Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing
never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the
character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the
Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the
company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice
between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never
drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian
shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the
bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the
truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the
experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both
considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things
They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it
is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his
book (and the Vietnam War) unforgettable.
The stories do involve a lot of graphic imagery, violence and some
profanity, none of which ever feel gratuitous. If you are disturbed by that,
then this book may not be for you, but I would strongly suggest to anyone
else that this book is worth experiencing.
/tdw/
| Thom's Review The Things They Carried |
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