Critical Essay #2: "The Things They Carried"

Title: The Things They Carried

Author(s): Steven Kaplan

Publication Details: Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Source: Short Story Criticism.

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Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2005. From Literature Resource Center.

Document Type: Critical essay

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: 

[(essay date 1995) In the following essay, Kaplan contends that in The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien "emphasizes the magical powers of storytelling," incorporating both factual writing and memoir to create fiction that is "truer than fact."]

Before America became militarily involved in defending the sovereignty of South Vietnam, it had to, as one historian recently put it, "invent" the country and the political issues at stake there.¹ The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and macabre storytellers. First, America decided for Vietnam what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression according to American standards; then, the United States military traveled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make America's notions about these things clear to the Vietnamese people, eventually using brute technological force.
For the American military and government, the Vietnam they had in effect invented became fact. For the soldiers they then sent there, however, the facts their government had created about who the enemy was, what the issues were, and how the war was to be won were quickly overshadowed by a world of uncertainty. Ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense at all. As David Halberstram puts it in his novel One Very Hot Day, the only fact of which an American soldier in Vietnam could be certain was that "yes was no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe."² Almost all Vietnam War writing--fiction and nonfiction--makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain. As Philip Beidler has pointed out, "Most of the time in Vietnam, there were some things that seemed just too terrible and strange to be true and others that were just too terrible and true to be strange."³
The main question that Beidler's study of the literature of the war raises is how, considering the overwhelming ambiguity that characterized the Vietnam experience, could any sense or meaning be derived from what happened and, above all, how could this meaning, if it were found, be conveyed to those who had not experienced the war? The answer for Beidler is that "Words are all we have. In the hands of true artists ... they may yet preserve us against the darkness."⁴ Similarly, for Tim O'Brien the language of fiction is the most accurate means for conveying, again as Beidler puts it, "what happened (in Vietnam) ... what might have happened, what could have happened, what should have happened, and maybe also what can be kept from happening or what can be made to happen."⁵ If the experience of Vietnam and its accompanying sense of chaos and confusion can be shown at all, then for Tim O'Brien it will not be in the fictions created by politicians but in the stories told by writers of fiction.
In The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O'Brien takes the act of trying to reveal and understand the uncertainties about the war by looking at it through the imagination perhaps a step further than he did in Going After Cacciato.⁶ In The Things They Carried, O'Brien destroys the line dividing fact from fiction, and tries to show even more so than in Cacciato that fiction (or the imagined world) can often be truer than fact. As in all of his other works, in The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien emphasizes the magical powers of storytelling. He also takes his readers straight into the middle of the process through which facts and memory are transformed in fiction.
The book's first chapter provides a precise account of the items referred to in its title: the things they carried. O'Brien introduces the reader here to some things, both imaginary and concrete, emotional and physical, that the average foot soldier carried through the Vietnamese jungles. O'Brien depicts all of the "things" that appear in the first chapter in a precise, scientific style. The reader is told how much each object weighs, either psychologically or physically, and in the case of artillery, O'Brien even says how many ounces each round weighed: "As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine. Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at maximum."⁷
As this passage shows, even the most insignificant details seem to be worth mentioning. Accordingly, one of the main characters is not just from Oklahoma City but from "Oklahoma City, Oklahoma" (5), as if mentioning the state might somehow make the location more factual, more certain. More striking than this obsession with even the minutest detail, however, is the academic tone that at times makes the narrative sound like a government report. The reader finds, for example, such transitional phrases as "for instance" (5) and "in addition" (7), and whole paragraphs dominated by sentences that begin with "because" (5). O'Brien is striving, above all else, to convince his readers of the importance, the authenticity, of the things they carried.
In the midst of all of this factuality and certainty, however, there are signals that all of the information O'Brien gives the reader in this opening chapter will not amount to much, that the facts are merely there to conceal uncertainties, and that the words that follow the frequent "becauses" do not explain anything. The reader is told in the opening pages, for example, that the most important thing First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried were some letters from a girl he loved. The narrator, one of Cross's friends in the war and now a forty-three-year-old writer named Tim O'Brien, tells his readers that the girl does not love Cross, but that he constantly indulges in "hoping" and "pretending" (3) in an effort to turn her imagined love into fact. O'Brien also says "she was a virgin," and then he follows this information with the qualifying remark that Cross "was almost sure" of this (3). On the next page, Cross becomes even more uncertain as he sits at "night and wonder[s] if Martha was a virgin" (4). Shortly after this, Cross wonders who took the pictures he now holds in his hands "because he knew she had boyfriends" (5), but O'Brien never says how Cross "knew" this. Then at the end of the chapter, after one of Cross's men has died because Cross has been too busy thinking of Martha, Cross sits at the bottom of his foxhole crying, not so much for the member of his platoon who has been killed, "but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, and because she was ... a poet and a virgin and uninvolved" (17).
This pattern of stating the facts about something and then quickly calling these facts into question that characterizes Jimmy Cross's thoughts in these opening pages is also characteristic of the way the narrator portrays events throughout this book. The facts about an event are given, and then they are quickly qualified or called into question. Then a new set of facts about the same subject emerges, which are again quickly called into question--and on and on, seemingly without end. For example, O'Brien catalogues the various weapons that the soldiers carried, even down to the weapons' weight, thus making them seem important in the sense that their protective power seems real. Several of these passages, however, are introduced by the fact that some of these same weapons were also carried by the character Ted Lavender, and each section of the first chapter (there are four in all) that explains what he carried is introduced by a qualifying phrase that reveals something about which Lavender himself was not at all certain when he was carrying his weapons: he did not know that his weapons would not protect him from ultimately getting shot and killed (4, 7, 10).
O'Brien's method in this book of trying to convey the average soldier's sense of uncertainty about what happened in Vietnam by presenting the "what-ifs" and "maybes" as if they were facts and then calling these facts back into question again, can be seen as a variation of that haunting phrase that was so often used by American soldiers to convey their own uncertainty about what happened in Vietnam: "there it is." Soldiers used this phrase to make the unspeakable and indescribable, the uncertain, very real and present for a fleeting moment. "There it is" would be uttered, for example, to affirm a ludicrous statement made about the horror of the war after someone had been killed. Similarly, O'Brien presents his readers with facts and stories in this book that are certain and real only for a moment because the strange "balance" in Vietnam between "crazy and almost crazy" (20) always creeps back in and forces the mind that is remembering and retelling a story to remember and retell it one more time in a different form, adding different nuances, and then to tell it one more time.
Storytelling in this book is thus something in which "the whole world is rearranged" (39) in an effort to get at the "full truth" (49) about events that themselves deny the possibility of arriving at something called the full, factual truth. By giving the reader facts and then calling those facts into question, and by telling stories and then saying that those stories happened (147), and then that they did not happen (203), and then that they might have happened (204), O'Brien puts even more emphasis in The Things They Carried on the question he poses in Going After Cacciato: namely, how can a work of fiction paradoxically become more real than the very real events upon which it is based, and how can the confusing experiences of the average soldier in Vietnam be conveyed so that they acquire at least a momentary sense of certainty?
In The Things They Carried, the conflict between fact and fiction is made an issue even before the book begins. The first thing to appear at the opening of this book is a reminder that "This is a work of fiction. Except a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary." Then, immediately after this, O'Brien says that "This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa." The six men named here, the reader discovers only a few pages later, are the book's main characters.
These prefatory comments force a reader to consider the fictional as real, since the book is dedicated to the characters who appear in it. O'Brien informs his readers at one point that his intention in telling these war stories is to get at the "full truth" (49) about them, and yet from the outset, he has already shown his readers that the full truth as he sees it is ambiguous: are these stories and their characters real or imaginary, or does the "truth" lie hovering somewhere between the two? A closer look at the book's narrative structure reveals that O'Brien is incapable of answering the questions he initially raises because the very act of writing fiction about the war, of telling war stories, as he practices it in The Things They Carried, is determined by the nature of the Vietnam war and ultimately by life where "the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity" (88).
The emphasis on ambiguity underlying O'Brien's narrative technique in The Things They Carried resembles the pattern used by Joseph Conrad's narrator, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, which J. Hillis Miller characterizes as a lifting of veils to reveal a truth that is quickly obscured again by the dropping of a new veil.⁸ Repeatedly, O'Brien says that he is telling "the full and exact truth" (181), yet as a reader makes his or her way through the book and gradually finds the same stories being retold with new facts and from a new perspective, it begins to become apparent that there is no such thing for O'Brien as the full and exact truth.
Repeating and varying the same stories in this manner is what O'Brien calls "Good Form" in the title of one of the chapters of The Things They Carried. The reason this is good form is that "telling stories" like this "can make things present" (204). The stories in this book are not somehow truer than the things that actually happened in Vietnam because they contain some higher, metaphysical truth: "True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstractions or analysis" (84). Rather, what makes these stories true is the impact they have as the events within them come alive for a reader. This approach to storytelling echoes Wolfgang Iser's theory of representation in his essay "Representation: A Performative Act." According to Iser,

Whatever shape or form these various [philosophical or fictional] conceptualizations [of life] may have, their common denominator is the attempt to explain origins. In this respect they close off those very potentialities that literature holds open. Of course literature also springs from the same anthropological need, since it stages what is inaccessible, thus compensating for the impossibility of knowing what it is to be. But literature is not an explanation of origins; it is a staging of the constant deferment of explanation, which makes the origin explode into its multifariousness.It is at this point that aesthetic semblance makes its full impact. Representation arises out of and thus entails the removal of difference, whose irremovability transforms representation into a performative act of staging something. This staging is almost infinitely variable, for in contrast to explanations, no single staging could ever remove difference and so explain origin. On the contrary, its very multiplicity facilitates an unending mirroring of what man is, because no mirrored manifestation can ever coincide with our actual being.⁹

From Iser's perspective, when people conceptualize life, they attempt to step outside themselves and look at who they are. And according to Iser, the reason people constantly make new attempts, through telling stories, at conceptualizing their lives and uncovering their true identities is that looking at who they might be is the closest they can to come to discovering who they actually are. Similarly, representing events in fiction is an attempt to understand them by detaching them from the "real world" and placing them in a world that is being staged. In The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien tries to make his readers believe that what they are reading is true because he wants them to step outside their everyday reality and participate in the events he is portraying. It is as if he wants his readers to believe in his stories to the point where they are virtually in them so that they might gain a more thorough understanding of, or feeling for, what is being portrayed in each story. Representation as O'Brien practices it in this book is not a mimetic act but a "game," a process of acting things out, as Iser also calls it in a more recent essay, "The Play of the Text":

Now since the latter [the text] is fictional, it automatically invokes a convention-governed contract between author and reader indicating that the textual world is to be viewed not as reality but as if it were reality. And so whatever is repeated in the text is not meant to denote the world, but merely a world enacted. This may well repeat an identifiable reality, but it contains one all-important difference: what happens within it is relieved of the consequences inherent in the real world referred to. Hence in disclosing itself, fictionality signalizes that everything is only to be taken as if it were what it seems to be, to be taken--in other words--as play.¹⁰

In The Things They Carried, representation includes staging what might have happened in Vietnam while simultaneously questioning the accuracy and credibility of the narrative act itself. The reader is thus made fully aware of the fact that s/he is being made a participant in a game, in a "performative act," while also being asked to become immediately involved in the incredibly frustrating act of trying to make sense of events that resist understanding. The reader is thus permitted to experience first hand the uncertainty that characterized being in Vietnam. O'Brien forces his readers to "believe" that the only "certainty" was the "overwhelming ambiguity" (79).
This process is nowhere clearer than in a chapter called "How to Tell a True War Story." O'Brien opens this chapter by telling his readers "THIS IS TRUE," and then he wanders through a series of variations of the story about how Curt Lemon stepped on a mine and was blown up into a tree. The only thing true or certain about the story, however, is that it is being constructed and then deconstructed and then reconstructed right in front of the reader. O'Brien gives six different versions of the story of how Curt Lemon was killed, and each version is so discomforting that it is difficult to come up with a more accurate statement to describe his senseless death than "there it is," or as O'Brien puts it in this chapter, "in the end, really there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe 'Oh'" (84).
Before a reader learns how Curt Lemon was killed in this chapter on how to tell a true war story, O'Brien first tells the "true" story that Rat Kiley apparently told to the character/narrator O'Brien about how Kiley wrote to Lemon's sister and "says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world" (76). Two months after Kiley has written this letter, he still has not heard from Lemon's sister, and so he writes her off as a "dumb cooze" (76). This is what happened according to Kiley, and O'Brien assures his readers that the story is "incredibly sad and true" (77). However, when Rat Kiley tells a story in another chapter the reader is warned that he "swore up and down to its truth, although in the end, I'll admit, that doesn't amount to much of a warranty. Among the men in Alpha Company, Rat had a reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up the facts, and for most of us it was normal procedure to discount sixty or seventy percent of anything he had to say" (101).
Rat Kiley is an unreliable narrator, and his facts are always distorted, but this does not affect storytelling truth as far as O'Brien is concerned. The above passage on Rat Kiley's credibility as a storyteller concludes with the statement that "It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite: he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt" (101). This summarizes O'Brien's often confusing narrative strategy in The Things They Carried: the facts about what actually happened, or whether anything happened at all, are not important. They cannot be important because they themselves are too uncertain, too lost in a world in which certainty has vanished somewhere between the "crazy and almost crazy." The important thing is that any story about the war, any "true war story," must "burn so hot" when it is told that it becomes alive for the listener/reader in the act of its telling.
In Rat Kiley's story about how he wrote to Curt Lemon's sister, for example, the details the reader is initially given are exaggerated to the point where, in keeping with O'Brien's fire metaphor, they begin to heat up. Curt Lemon, according to O'Brien, "would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years" (75). And once Lemon went fishing with a crate of hand grenades, "the funniest thing in world history ... about twenty zillion dead gook fish" (76). But the story does not get so hot that it burns, it does not become so "incredibly sad and true," as O'Brien puts it, until Rat tells the reader at the story's close that "I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back" (77). It is these words and not the facts that come before them that make the story true for O'Brien. These words make a reader feel Rat's loss and his anger.
At the beginning of this chapter, O'Brien asks his readers several times to "Listen to Rat," to listen more to how he says things than to what he is saying. And of all of the words that stand out in his story, it is the word "cooze" that makes his story come alive. "You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil" (76). This is just one of the many ways O'Brien gives for determining what constitutes a true war story in an unending list of possibilities that includes reacting to a story with the ambiguous words "Oh" and "There it is." Like these two phrases, Rat Kiley's word "cooze" is an attempt in an unending sequence of attempts to utter some truth about the Vietnam experience and, by extension, about war in general. There is no simplistic moral to be derived from this word, such as that war is obscene or corrupt. "A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct" (76). There is simply the very real and true fact that the closest thing to certainty and truth in a war story as in life is a vague utterance, a punch at the darkness, an attempt to momentarily rip through the veil that repeatedly returns and covers the reality and truth of what actually happened.
It is thus no coincidence that right in the middle of this chapter on writing a true war story, O'Brien says that the main thing he can remember from the short time encompassing Lemon's death, "Even now, at this instant," is Mitchell Sanders's "yo-yo" (83). This toy can be seen as a metaphor for the playful act of narration that O'Brien practices in this book, a game that he plays by necessity. The only real way to tell a true war story, according to O'Brien, is to keep telling it "one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth" (91), which is ultimately impossible because the real truth, the full truth, as the events themselves, are lost forever in "a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent" (88). The only way to "tell a true war story" is "if you just keep on telling it" (91) because "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant" (89).
"How to Tell a True War Story" ends with the narrator's finally telling how he and Dave Jensen were ordered to climb up into a tree and remove the parts of Curt Lemon's body: "I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must've been the intestines" (89). He makes six attempts to tell this story before he can finally confront the "truth" as opposed to the mere facts of this story, and the "truth" of the story is that which speaks to a person's heart and stomach: "But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing 'Lemon Tree' as we threw down the parts." Important in this story, as in all of the stories in the book, is not what happened, but what might have happened.
Following the narrative technique of this book, a story's truth is clearly not something that can be distinguished or separated from a story, and the veracity or falseness of a story cannot be determined from a perspective outside the story. As Geoffrey Hartman says regarding poetry, "To keep a poem in mind is to keep it there, not to resolve it into available meanings."¹¹ Similarly, for O'Brien it is not the fact that a story actually happened that makes it true and worth remembering, any more than the story itself can be said to contain a final truth. The important thing is that a story becomes so much a part of the present that "there is nothing to remember except the story" (40). This is why O'Brien's narrator feels compelled to tell and then retell many variations of the same story over and over and over again. This is also why he introduces each new version of a story with such prefatory comments as "This one does it for me. I have told it before many times, many versions but here is what actually happened" (85). What actually happened, the story's truth, is contained in the way the story is told and in how it makes a reader feel--it must take a person beyond the mere facts. A story is true when it entertains, "but entertain in the highest way, entertain your brain and your stomach, and your heart, and your erotic zones, and make you laugh."¹²
There is nothing new in what O'Brien demonstrates here about trying to tell war stories--that the "truths" they contain "are contradictory" (87), elusive, and thus indeterminate. Two hundred years ago, Goethe also reflected on the same inevitable contradictions that arise when one speaks of what happened or might have happened in battle, when he tried to depict the senseless bloodshed during the allied invasion of revolutionary France in his autobiographical book Campaign in France; and, of course, Homer's Iliad is the primal statement on the contradictions inherent in war. However, what is new in O'Brien's approach to depicting war in The Things They Carried is that he makes the axiom that in war "Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true" (87) the basis for the act of telling a war story.
The narrative strategy that O'Brien uses in this book to portray the uncertainty of what happened in Vietnam is not restricted to depicting war, and O'Brien does not limit it to the war alone. The Things They Carried opens, as it closes, with a love story. The book also ends as it begins: with a man thinking of someone he loved in the past. Besides these two women, the reader is also introduced to the Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong, who is idealized and worshiped as are Martha in the first chapter and Linda in the last. There is also Henry Dobbin's girlfriend, whose nylon stocking continues to protect him even after he learns she has dumped him. In each of these instances, the reader is shown someone conjuring up memories of a person from the past and then telling themselves stories about that person. Moreover, the stories remembered and told in the chapters just mentioned are remembered and told precisely to make the present and future bearable and even possible. Storytelling, in short, becomes a means for survival in this book, much as it is in Going After Cacciato. When O'Brien tells the story of the death of Curt Lemon, for example, he informs his readers that this story "wasn't a war story. It was a love story" (90). As I said above, there are several other love stories in this book, and I would even argue that this entire book can be seen as a love story. It is O'Brien's expression of his love of storytelling as an act that can wrestle tolerable and meaningful truths from even the most horrible events.
O'Brien concludes his book with a chapter titled "The Lives of the Dead," in which he moves from Vietnam back to when he was nine years old. On the surface, the book's last chapter describes O'Brien's first date, with his first love, a girl named Linda who died of a brain tumor a few months after he had taken her to see the movie "The Man Who Never Was." What this chapter is really about, however, as its title suggests, is how the dead (which can also include people who may never have actually existed) can be given life in a work of fiction. In a story, O'Brien says, "memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness" (260). Like the man who never was in the film of that title, the people that never were except in memories and the imagination can become real or alive, if only for a moment, through the act of storytelling.
When you tell a story, according to O'Brien, "you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself" (178). And by doing this, you can externalize "a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse" (179). The storyteller does not, however, just escape from the events and people in a story by placing them on paper. The act of telling a given story is an ongoing and never-ending process. By constantly involving and then reinvolving the reader in the task of determining what "actually" happened in a given situation, in a story, and by forcing the reader to experience the impossibility of ever really knowing with any certainty what actually happened, O'Brien liberates himself from the lonesome responsibility of remembering and trying to understand events. He creates instead a community of individuals immersed in the act of experiencing the uncertainty of all events, regardless of whether these events occurred in Vietnam, in a small town in Minnesota, or somewhere in the reader's own life.
O'Brien thus saves himself, as he says in the last sentence of his book, from the fate of his character, Norman Bowker, who eventually kills himself in a chapter called "Speaking of Courage," because he cannot find some lasting meaning in the horrible things he experienced in Vietnam. O'Brien saves himself in that he demonstrates through the narrative strategy of this book that the most important thing is to be able to recognize and accept the fact that events have no fixed or final meaning and that the only meaning events can have at all is one which momentarily emerges, then shifts and changes each new time they come alive when they are being remembered and portrayed in stories.
Norman Bowker hangs himself in the locker room of the local YMCA after playing basketball with some friends (181), at least partially because he has a story locked up inside himself that he feels he cannot tell because no one would want to hear it. It is the story of how he failed to save his friend Kiowa from drowning in a field of human excrement: "A good war story, he thought, but it was not a war for war stories, not for talk of valor, and nobody in town wanted to know about the stink. They wanted good intentions and good deeds" (169).¹³ Bowker's dilemma is thus remarkably similar to that of Hemingway's character Krebs in the story "Soldier's Home." Neither of these men returning from war can tell his story: "At first Krebs ... did not want to talk about the war at all. Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it. His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities."¹⁴
O'Brien, on the other hand, took on the task after his war "of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to" him (179). What he explains in The Things They Carried is that it is impossible to know "exactly what had happened." What he wants his readers to know are all the things he/they/we did not know about Vietnam and will probably never know. And what he wants his readers to feel in the deepest part of their stomachs is the sense of uncertainty his character/narrator Tim O'Brien experiences twenty years after the war when he returns to the place where his friend Kiowa sank into a "field of shit" and tries to find "something meaningful and right" (212) to say. Ultimately he can only say, "well ... there it is" (212). Each time a reader of The Things They Carried returns to Vietnam through O'Brien's labyrinth of stories, he or she will become increasingly aware of the fact that this statement is the closest one can probably ever come to knowing the "real truth," the undying uncertainty of the Vietnam War.

Notes

1. Loren Baritz, Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us into Vietnam and Made Us Fight the Way We Did (New York: Morrow, 1985) 142-43.
2. David Halberstram, One Very Hot Day (New York: Houghton, 1967) 127.
3. Philip Beidler, American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1982) 4.
4. Timothy J. Lomperis, Reading the Wind: The Literature of the Vietnam War: An Interpretative Critique (Durham: Duke UP, 1989) 87.
5. Lomperis 87.
6. The reviewers of The Things They Carried are pretty much split on whether to call it a novel or a collection of short stories. When I asked Tim O'Brien in an interview in July 1992 what he felt was the most adequate designation, he said that the book is neither a collection of stories nor a novel: he prefers to call it simply "a work of fiction." One of the best discussions of the uniqueness of this book appeared in a review in the Minneapolis Star: "O'Brien is inventing a form here. His book evokes the hyperintense personal journalism of Michael Herr and the journalism-as-novel of Norman Mailer, but it is a different animal. It is fiction, even though its main character has the same name as the author. It is nonfiction, even though Tim O'Brien did not exactly throw the grenade that mangled the slim, dainty young man in black pajamas. It is a confession, but even as he cringes over the doubt and cowardice attributed to Tim O'Brien, the reader must carefully remember Tim O'Brien is a device. ... The Things They Carried defies classification, which won't hurt its survival chances. ... If I had to label it, I'd call it an epic prose poem of our time, deromanticizing and demystifying and yet singing the beauty and mystery of human life over its screams and explosions, curses and lies." Dan Carpenter, "Author Brings Reality to Vietnam War Story," Minneapolis Star and Tribune 12 Mar. 1990 NewsBank, "Literature," 1985, microfiche).
7. Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston: Houghton, 1990) 7. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses.
8. J. Hillis Miller, "Heart of Darkness Revisited," Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin's, 1989) 158.
9. Wolfgang Iser, "Representation: A Performative Act," Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) 245.
10. Iser, "The Play of the Text," Prospecting 251.
11. Geoffrey Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980) 224.
12. Tim O'Brien, interview, in Steven Kaplan, "An Interview with Tim O'Brien," Missouri Review 14.3 (1991): 106.
13. In the chapter following "Speaking of Courage," which O'Brien simply calls "Notes," he typically turns the whole story upside down "in the interest of truth" and tells us that Norman Bowker was not responsible for Kiowa's horrible death: "That part of the story is my own" (182). This phrase could be taken to mean that this part of the story is his own creation or that he was the one responsible for Kiowa's death.
14. Ernest Hemingway, "Soldier's Home," The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribners, 1953) 145.

Source Citation

Kaplan, Steven. "The Things They Carried." Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 169-192. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

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