Research Paper on "Things They Carried: In Search"

Research Paper 4 pages (1501 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Things They Carried: In search of a 'true' war story through fiction

One of the chapters of Tim O'Brien's tale of the Vietnam War the Things They Carried is entitled "How to Tell a True War Story." O'Brien, throughout the novel, seems obsessed with the need to tell a 'true' story of the Vietnam War, a narrative he believes has been polluted with lies. O'Brien writes that a "true war story is never moral… if a story seems moral, do not believe it. If 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" (O'Brien 65). A story about war has no meaning -- it is about the absence of meaning, and the sacrifice of young men's lives for nothing, counsels O'Brien. However, despite this assertion, O'Brien's book is also framed as a quest for truth, as the writer shifts back and forth, from the present to the past, from peace to war, from the lives of the dead to the lives of the survivors.

Determining the real identity of the narrator of the Things They Carried poses a challenge for the reader. On one hand, the book reads like a novel, containing vivid details, descriptions, literary devices (like extended metaphors), and dialogue sequences like a novel. On the other hand, the narrator is named 'Tim O'Brien' and the reader is likely to know, from reading the book jacket that the 'novel' was written by an author of the same name who served in Vietnam. Despite the clear, matter-of-fact quality of his style, O'Brien presents his tale in a deliberately ambiguous way. This suggests that the nature of war is always ambiguous and slippery. It is elusive as the enemy -- and the cause of freedom for which the Alpha Company is supposed to be fighting. The novel jumps back and forth in time, and in Tim's life. Although each chapter advances the narrative of the book, each chapter could also function as a stand-alone short story. Some of the stories are told in the present tense, in the lived moment of the war. The reader is surprised by the end of such tales, as in the case of a conventional short work of fiction. Other stories are told from the perspective of Tim today, a writer, husband, and father living in safety in Massachusetts, far away from the horrors of war. According to the Washington Post literary critic, Joseph Peschel, O'Brien's novel is not fictional, or non-fictional, but "meta-fictional" (Peschel 2010).

This sense of an elusive quest -- for meaning and for truth -- is also present in O'Brien's other classical novel detailing the Vietnam experience, Going After Cacciato, in which the narrator Paul Berlin and his company are forced to track down a private who has deserted, a man who has resolved to walk all of the way to Paris to bear witness to the (ultimately futile) peace accords. O'Brien sees Vietnam as a failure and an enigma, and over again these themes reoccur in his work. But within the Things They Carried, O'Brien's paradox of Vietnam is even more obviously manifested: the novel claims to search for the truth of war, all the while using fiction and some obvious 'lies.' These 'lies' include encounters that the fictional O'Brien never witnessed, as the novel shifts in point-of-view from that of an omniscient to a first-person narrative.

O'Brien seems to embrace a very old but very true cliche of fiction, that it is sometimes necessary to lie to tell a greater truth -- yet he also says that the 'test' of a true war story is if the reader would feel cheated if it was a lie -- a very high standard of veracity (O'Brien 79). O'Brien tells the reader, in some instances, what different characters are thinking or feeling like a conventional narrator of fiction, such as the guilt that Dave Jensen feels after the death of his friend Lee Strunk. At other times O'Brien speculates about the meaning of his experience in a more musing, philosophical manner, in a way that is characteristic of nonfiction. Even at the end of the novel, the reader is left to wonder: did O'Brien actually kill a man? He calls the fact that he shot a man point blank a story-truth, but labeling the past as such seems like a way for him to look his little daughter in the eye and say "of course not" when she asks him if he ever killed anyone (O'Brien 172).

Classifying the Things They Carried as a genre is uncertain. On one hand, the book reads like a novel, containing vivid detail, descriptions, literary devices (like extended metaphors), and dialogue sequences like a novel. On the other hand, the narrator is named 'Tim O'Brien' and the reader is likely to know, from reading the book jacket that the 'novel' was written by an author of the same name who served in Vietnam. O'Brien strives to write a true narrative of war, yet presents his tale in a manner that forces the reader to look back on the experience of Vietnam in the same way as a 'real' survivor -- through a glass darkly. O'Brien's style suggests that the nature of war is always ambiguous and slippery. It is elusive as the enemy -- and the cause of freedom. According to O'Brien:

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain (O'Brien 60).

Even in nonfiction narratives that purport to be truly 'real,' there is an element of falsehood, O'Brien would contend. "A gap inevitably opens up between the imaginary casting of an event (the fictive event) and the factual details of that event (the historical chronicle)," particularly in as emotionally wrenching a situation as Vietnam (Timmerman, 2000, p.1).

Despite its narrative ambiguity and its unclear status as fiction or a novel, O'Brien's war story, the Things They Carried introduces the protagonists with a cool, factual narrative list of the different things that members of the Alpha Company carry with them. These span everything from photographs of loved ones at home to M&Ms. Causes do not matter -- they are simply focused on survival and physical details. "The Things They Carried were largely determined by necessity" (O'Brien 2). However, despite the novel's 'just the facts' style, every detail within the tale contains a paradox. For example, O'Brien keeps saying that he strives to write a true narrative of war, and there is no glory in war, yet some of the men do act in heroic ways. O'Brien says explicitly that war is pointless and depicts all the horrors of the solder's lives, including digging one of the few truly noble members of the company out of a jungle field full of human waste and sewage. But even in this moment of ultimate horror, there is also redemption. One of the crudest and most foul-mouthed members of the company, Azar, begins the quest making foul jokes, but after retrieving the body of the young man from the mire, suddenly experiences a revelation of the error of his ways and apologizes (O'Brien 206).

"The Things They Carried is about guilt and responsibility, about courage and cowardice and the difficulty, sometimes, in distinguishing between them. it's about the ways people try to withstand the crushing weight of their consciences and their loneliness. Finally, it… READ MORE

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