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Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 26, 2021

In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), among others. Comprising 22 pieces—some little more than vignettes, others more “traditional” stories—the collection details the experiences of the soldier Tim O’Brien, who returns to his native Minnesota after a tour of duty in Vietnam. In his subsequent role as author, O’Brien records his recollections in a false memoir of sorts as a way of reconstructing the war’s elusive “truth.” O’Brien’s goal in The Things They Carried, he tells Michael Coffey, “was to write something utterly convincing but without any rules as to what’s real and what’s made up. I forced myself to try to invent a new form. I had never invented form before” (60).

“In the Field” follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon of 17 remaining men as they search a Vietnamese muck field for Kiowa, a lost comrade. Cross, who figures prominently in several of the book’s pieces—including the eponymous “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s most anthologized story—feels tremendous guilt over Kiowa’s death, not the least because the previous evening, just before an ambush, Cross refused to disobey orders and to move his men to higher, and therefore safer, ground. Kiowa, buried when a fellow soldier inadvertently gave away the platoon’s position to the enemy, was a popular soldier. Out of respect for their fallen comrade, the men dutifully wade through waist-deep sewage searching for his remains; they sustain themselves with a morbid sense of humor, making light of the situation in order to quell their fear of random, sudden death at the hands of a faceless enemy. Cross quickly realizes that he is ill suited for the military, having been shipped to Vietnam after joining the officer training corps in college only to be with friends and to collect a few college credits. “[Cross] did not care one way or the other about the war,” O’Brien intones, “and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field” (168).

Tim O’Brien/The Austin Chronicle

War is a great leveler in O’Brien’s fiction. In the field where Cross and his men search for Kiowa, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). The young lieutenant, however, suspends his humanity only with great difficulty. Ruminating on Kiowa’s death, he imagines writing a letter to the soldier’s father before deciding that “no apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway” (176). Cross’s rationalization may absolve him (at least in part) of his guilt over Kiowa’s death, though it is also a tacit admission of his lack of control over the war’s daily life-and-death struggles. Cross’s desire to organize the details of Kiowa’s death in his own mind is an extension of O’Brien’s attempt in The Things They Carried to construct a coherent narrative that finds the essential truth of war (a notion that the author confirms in the ironically titled “How to Tell a True War Story” which acts as an interpretive key to his recollections).

Upon the discovery of Kiowa’s body, the men properly mourn the loss of their fellow soldier, though “they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (175). Cross, yearning for war’s end, imagines himself on a golf course in his New Jersey hometown, free of the burden of leading men to their deaths. O’Brien examines the onus of responsibility often, and in the related story “Field Trip,” which details the author’s return to Vietnam two decades later to the field where Kiowa died, O’Brien finds a world barely recognizable as the one he left behind. “The field remains, but in a form much different from what O’Brien remembers, smaller now, and full of light,” Patrick A. Smith writes of O’Brien’s visit. “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But it is memory, O’Brien makes clear, that supersedes experience and haunts soldiers long after the shooting has stopped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coffey, Michael. “Tim O’Brien: Inventing a New Form Helps the Author Talk about War, Memory, and Storytelling.” Publishers Weekly, 16 February 1990, pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Tim. “In the Field.” In The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

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Ransom Center Magazine

June 20, 2017 - John Young

The textual “truth” behind Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts , Research + Teaching Tagged With: Fellowships , fiction , Field Trip , history , Houghton Mifflin , literature , Macalester Today , magazine , McCall’s , memoir , On the Rainy River , Playboy , soldier , The Things They Carried , Tim O'Brien , truth , Vietnam , war

Tim O’Brien’s  The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The book depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer. The Harry Ransom Center holds the author’s archive .

Two of the most poignant stories in The Things They Carried are “On the Rainy River” and “Field Trip.” “Rainy River” portrays a young O’Brien, weeks removed from his college graduation, leaving his home in Worthington, Minnesota, for a fishing outpost on the Canadian border, agonizing over whether to report for Army induction or to live as a draft dodger. In “Field Trip,” O’Brien returns to Vietnam many years after his tour of duty as a foot soldier and radio operator, now with his ten-year-old daughter, Kathleen, as he seeks some measure of peace from the traumatic memories of a close comrade’s death. Because these stories are removed from the daily realities of the war, they tend to be more accessible to O’Brien’s audience. But in the original version of Things , readers would have turned the page to discover that neither of these stories is “true.”

Throughout The Things They Carried , O’Brien famously distinguishes between “happening-truth,” or an accurate and verifiable account of historical events, and “story truth,” or readers’ genuine experience of the story, even if the details are invented. The book blurs the lines between fiction and truth even further in its dedication to a group of soldiers who turn out to be fictional characters throughout the rest of the book, and in the appearance of “Tim O’Brien” in several stories, a figure who seems very similar to, but not quite identical with, the author. Many readers, and most of my students over many years of teaching the book, take the circumstances of “Rainy River” and “Field Trip” to be at least more or less true (in the conventional sense): they assume that O’Brien made some sort of trip away from his family while deciding whether to honor his draft notice, even if not precisely the one portrayed here, and that O’Brien and his daughter went back to Vietnam years after the war, even if, again, the “real” version of that event differs from its fictional representation. (That is, they take these stories to be relatively conventional instances of fiction based on episodes from the author’s life, even if contained within a much more complex metafictional narrative.)

In fact, while O’Brien did agonize about serving in a war he vehemently opposed, he never made any trip like the one in “Rainy River;” his worries played out entirely in Worthington. And, while O’Brien did return to Vietnam in 1994, accompanied by his then girlfriend—this trip is the subject of his well-known piece for The New York Times Magazine , “The Vietnam in Me”—his daughter did not go with him, because he had no children. In the typescript for the book that O’Brien sent to Houghton Mifflin, the chapter titled “Good Form,” which discusses O’Brien’s interactions with the (ostensibly real) veteran Norman Bowker, also included a long passage disavowing any happening-truth in “Rainy River” or “Field Trip,” or in various other events in the book, such as O’Brien’s empathetic imagination of the Vietnamese life he has ended by shooting an enemy soldier on patrol, or a postwar visit from his former company commander, Jimmy Cross. Here is a portion of that early version (I have retained the cross-throughs as they appear in the copy at the Harry Ransom Center):

I don’t have a daughter named Kathleen. I don’t have a daughter. I don’t have children. To my knowledge, at least, I never killed anyone. Jimmy Cross never visited me at my house in Massachusetts, because of course Jimmy Cross does not exist in the world of objects, and never did. He’s purely invented, like Martha, and like Kiowa or Mitchell Sanders and all the others. I never ran way to the Rainy River. I wanted to—badly—but I didn’t .

I came across this typescript during a month-long fellowship at the Ransom Center, poring through as many of O’Brien’s papers as I could, and have written about it more extensively in How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production (University of Iowa Press, 2017). Ever since my first encounter with this aspect of O’Brien’s papers, I have been fascinated by the question of how readers would interact differently with the book if passages like this one (and another deleted chapter, “The Real Mary Anne,” which takes the opposite tack of insisting that the heroine of “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” was, against the odds, an actual person) had been retained. Or, to put that counterfactual question another way: how might O’Brien’s real readers have responded to the version(s) of The Things They Carried that could have been published, but weren’t? We can start to think through those questions by looking back further than the typescript, to the magazine versions of several chapters that appeared before the book.

O’Brien’s Magazine Readers

While the relationship between fiction and truth is questioned elsewhere in The Things They Carried for readers to at least reasonably doubt the veracity of stories like “Rainy River” and “Field Trip,” some of O’Brien’s original readers would have had no such contextual cues, as they found these stories in magazines. “Rainy River” appeared first in two periodicals: Macalester Today , O’Brien’s college alumni magazine, and Playboy , which paid $5,000, the largest magazine check of O’Brien’s career to that point. Macalester Today heightens the sense of autobiographical reality with its subheading, “A writer remembers the summer of 1968, when he found himself in desperate trouble. A month after graduating from Macalester, he was drafted to serve in Vietnam.” But O’Brien’s own introduction to the story immediately undercuts this impression, as he explains his choice to use a character who shares his name but is otherwise “almost entirely invented”: “Personally, I can’t see that it matters in the least—what counts is the artifact, the work itself—but nonetheless, with this book in particular, people seem interested in knowing what’s ‘real’ and what isn’t. As with all fiction, the answer is simple: if you believe it, it’s real; if you don’t, it isn’t.” O’Brien here deftly sidesteps the question of what’s “real,” at least as most of his readers would understand it, or why they might be especially concerned about such issues with this book, for an answer that bleeds into his more developed sense of “story truth” in the book. But given the context of an alumni magazine, we might easily assume readers who are at least relatively predisposed to take the events in “Rainy River” as closer to “real” than they are, based not only on the question of whether they “believe it,” but also on the types of stories one expects to find in this venue.

“Field Trip” appeared in the August 1990 issue of McCall’s , part of the magazine’s “Summer Fiction Special,” with a readership presumably attuned to the father-daughter relationship as much as the memories of wartime trauma. Indeed, the pull quote on the story’s first page highlights O’Brien’s supposed daughter as if she were the story’s central consciousness: “Kathleen was only ten, but her father wanted her to understand Vietnam, the place where he’d lost so much, and to witness what it was he’d find there.” McCall’s readers, had they encountered a version of the book with the passage above from “Good Form” intact, might have been especially surprised, even dismayed, to discover Kathleen’s fictionality. Of course, that’s often the point in The Things They Carried , as in the famous ending of “How to Tell a True War Story,” when the reader learns that the savage killing of a baby water buffalo was an overtly fictional episode. Identifying with O’Brien as a father, and/or with his young daughter’s attempt to make sense of a war she doesn’t understand, only to have the fictional rug pulled out, seems on its surface like the same kind of effect that the book goes to considerable lengths to create in its other chapters.

So, why did O’Brien remove these elements of The Things They Carried ? That is, why did he render the narrative less overtly metafictional, and how does this revision impact readers of the editions actually published? Part of the answer is that O’Brien’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, Camille Hykes, felt the collection would be stronger without its tricks exposed quite so much. “Why should the magician pull up his sleeve & tell us—Look, this is where the birds come from—when really, deep down, we knew it anyway?” she wrote to O’Brien. And O’Brien himself clearly decided this version of the book would more subtly, and more effectively, generate its metafictional effects.

But I’m not so sure. Much of the real power of The Things They Carried , for me, comes precisely from the process of building emotional investments in its characters, and then rebuilding those relationships on different terms once we have been told, in no uncertain terms, that the “people” we have come to care about don’t “exist in the world of objects.” We probably knew it all along, as Hykes suggests, but the best magic tricks, after all, are the ones where you know it’s an illusion but still can’t quite figure out what’s really “true.”

John K. Young is a professor of English at Marshall University and author of Black Writers, White Publishers (2006); Publishing Blackness , co-edited with George Hutchinson (2013), and How to Revise a True War Story (2017). His fellowship at the Ransom Center was supported by the Norman Mailer Endowed Fund.

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The Things They Carried

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Mortality and Death

The threat, even expectation, of death hangs over all of the soldiers in The Things They Carried . Even before he reaches Vietnam, Tim O'Brien (both the author of the collection and the frequent first person narrator) meditates on the inevitability of his death after he is drafted in "On The Rainy River," and considers dodging the draft and fleeing to Canada. The collection is haunted by the deaths of O'Brien's comrades—Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon…

Social Obligation

In The Things They Carried , O'Brien often focuses on how the men in his stories, even if they volunteered to fight, joined the army because of the unspoken pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and soldiers. These social obligations range from that of wider society (government, city/town) and narrows to the nuclear (family, friends, personal reflection). After being drafted in "On the Rainy River," Tim O'Brien runs from his hometown and ends up…

Within the stories in The Things They Carried the characters tell many stories to each other, and the question always asked of the storyteller is "What's the moral?" In "How to Tell a True War Story," Mitchell Sanders tells O'Brien about a company who has to lie dormant and watchful in the pitch-blackness over a village. They begin to have auditory hallucinations: champagne glasses clinking, music playing, a full chamber orchestra. They aren't supposed to…

Storytelling and Memory

Storytelling in The Things They Carried operates on multiple levels: at the level of the book itself, the stories within stories, and the reflections on the value of these stories both in the context of the war and then post-war. "The Lives of the Dead" speaks to O'Brien's belief that stories have the power to give an entire life to those who have passed on. He refers to his childhood love Linda who passed away…

Shame and Guilt

Shame and guilt are constant and often inextricable themes in The Things They Carried . Soldiers felt obligated to go to war for fear of embarrassing themselves, their families, and their towns if they fled. This embarrassment is bolstered by the guilt of not being "masculine" enough—not being brave, heroic, and patriotic enough. O'Brien reflects on how he thought he had a secret reserve of bravery and heroism stored away, waiting for the moment when…

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83 The Things They Carried Essay Topics, Questions, & Examples

Looking for The Things They Carried essay topics? The book by Tim O’Brien, a renowned American writer, is definitely worth reading and discussing!

📜 The Things They Carried Essay: How to Write

❓ the things they carried essay questions, 🏆 best the things they carried essay examples & prompts, 📌 the things they carried essay topics, 👍 good research topics about the things they carried.

Writing The Things They Carried essay on Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories is a challenging yet exciting task. In your paper, you might want to focus on the themes in The Things They Carried , talk about the key characters or symbolism of the book. In this article, you’ll find everything you might need to write an essay on this masterpiece. Below we’ve collected The Things They Carried essay questions, examples, ️and writing tips.

• Pick up your topic. Carefully read the book and make highlight places that you think you can put into consideration in your paper. Brainstorm some ideas you can use. Alternatively, take a look at our The Things They Carried essay examples to get inspiration.
• Draft your thesis statement. Take a look at your topic and think, what issue you’re going to analyze in your paper. Should it be about symbolism, or on The Things They Carried themes, or you will write a literary analysis on the author’s writing style?
• Stick to the structure. Organize your essay and make sure all your ideas and arguments follow one another in a logical sequence. First of all, present the topic and The Things They Carried essay thesis in your intro. The next step is to write the body paragraphs, where you will provide your evidence, arguments, counterarguments, illustrations, and quotes to support your point of view. And lastly, summarize all your ideas presented in the paper. Restate your thesis statement but don’t repeat it.

The Things They Carried: Thesis Statement Examples

• The Thing They Carried presents an exciting and rare combination of fiction and nonfiction.
• The distinction between “story truth” and “happening truth” presented in the short story Good Form highlights the theme of truth vs. reality that is one of the key in the book.
• The theme of morality in The Things They Carried is highlighted by the conflict faced by the soldiers when they are transitioning from their civilian lives to the reality of war.
• Why does “The Man I Killed” story focus on a Vietnamese character? Why are similar characters missing in other stories?
• Think, why did O’Brien end The Things They Carried with an episode from his childhood although the masterpiece is dedicated to the Vietnam war?
• Explore why this war stories collection doesn’t have heroes? How does the author define the term “heroism”?
• Is there a place for women on the war? Why do characters like Mary Anne, Martha, and Kathleen are essential in the novel?
• Investigate the book structure. Explore if the stories shift linearly and how the writing style contributes to the themes. How do the first person and third person narratives impact on readers perception?
• Explore the shame theme. Why did Tim O’Brien decide to go to Vietnam? Is there a place for shame in soldier’s lives? Does it drive them to heroism?
• What are the roles of women in O’Brien’s story? How does gender affect attitude to war? Analyze Mary Anne character to prove your point of view, explore her transition from an innocent girl to a killer. Check The Things They Carried essay topics for more inspiration.
• Think about the book title. Why O’Brien decided to use it? What do the main characters have to carry with them for the rest of their lives?
• Is this book fictional or non-fictional? Check the dedication page of the novel and explore how it is connected to the stories. Do you think that some book elements point to the actual events in the Vietnamese war?
• Which role does death play in The Things They Carried? Provide some examples that support your point of view, whether it is something to be afraid of or a release from a dreadful life?

Now, you can use the sample questions above or choose your own and write an excellent great paper on O’Brien’s novel. Make sure to check the essay examples below to get more sources of ideas!

• O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”: Literary Analysis Also, O’Brien seems to exaggerate in his vivid accounts of the experience the soldiers in the war. This collection of short stories is devoted to a platoon of American soldiers who fight in the Vietnam […]
• Emotional Burden in O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” Jimmy Cross, a lieutenant enlisted to take care of the other soldiers is the victim of the guilt burden. Collectively, these soldiers experienced different forms of emotional torture, which boiled down to emotional burdens as […]
• “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien The main theme of “The Things They Carried” by O’Brien is the events that were happening during the Vietnam War. It is a compelling short story of the Vietnam War.
• The Things They Carried Therefore, the Lieutenant relives this experience in his imagination, unable to escape these thoughts as a way of dealing with the difficulties and emotional burden of the war.
• The Realistic Setting in the O’Brien Story “The Things They Carried“ In the end, it was clear that the things that soldiers carried were not at all ‘things.’ The soldiers had to deal with the emotional feelings of men who were exposed to the risk of […]
• Psychological Aspects of War in “The Things They Carried” by O’Brian Written in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the work conveys the brutality and bloodthirstiness of military actions as well as the mental state of soldiers.
• “The Things They Carried” by O’Brien The suggested statement indicates that The Things They Carried by O’Brien broadcasts the horrors of the Vietnam War to the reader and allows one to understand the psychological aspects of that impact.
• “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “The Things They Carried” Place in Protest Literature The system, as a rule, is in a state of quasi-stable equilibrium with the environment, with the transformation from one state to another occurring cyclically and permanently through some limit states of the system.
• Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried Critical Analysis The Things They Carried is an extraordinarily comprehensive and graphic account of the Vietnam War that paints startlingly realistic imagery of the conflict.
• Tim O’Brien’s Story “The Things They Carried” The objects represented a thread that connected the soldiers in the depressing war setting to the real world that still exists somewhere.
• Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’ – Unpacking the Masterpiece The first narrative strategy to be mentioned in regards to The Things They Carried is the point of view. Repetition is a narrative strategy that is traced to the end of the story.”He hated her.
• Tim O‘Brien‘s “The Things They Carried” These soldiers were in a bad position, true, but that does not in any way excuse what happened to the village of Than Khe.
• O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily It further assesses the impact of the mode in which the information in the books is arranged compared to if it were set in a sequential manner.
• Fiction in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien In the story, the author portrays the inner nature of each of the characters via the symbolic features of the things carried by them.
• Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” This appears to be the main motif of O’Brien’s book and it is readers’ existential mode that prompts them to look at “The Things They Carried” as literary piece that promotes an anti-war sentiment or […]
• “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien: Novel Analysis It is possible to say that the author significantly contributed to the development of the comprehension of the Vietnam War in the American literature.
• Literary Success of “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien He was one of the soldiers sent into the fray, but due to his sense of duty, he managed to earn a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star during his stint in the said Vietnam […]
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien – Literature Analysis As it has been mentioned, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is full of different symbols which help understand the full meaning of the story along with the significance of the title and its […]
• Conventional Repetitive in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien Additionally, the author documents the heaviness of the objects to underscore the physical items the soldiers carried. Through repetitive documentation of the tangible objects carried by the soldiers, the author opens a leeway to allow […]
• War Impacts in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien The book gives a true reflection of the effect of war on soldiers from the perspective of a soldier who directly participated in a war to defend his country.
• Tim O’Brien: What Were “The Things They Carried” He brings out the aspect of emotional burdens that the soldiers draw from the war. Loneliness continues to engulf in the lives of the soldiers long after the end of the war.
• The Setting in “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien In the beginning, Jimmy is painted as an indecisive person who has to deal with the pressure of war in Vietnam and nonreciprocating love from Martha.
• Vietnam War in the Book “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien The Irony of being at war is that Peace and conflict are both inevitable; it is the way we handle either of the two that determines our opinion of life in general both in the […]
• “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien: A War Memoir This paper will focus on the title of the story “The Things They Carried” and how it acts as a guide to the meaning of the story.
• Literary Interpretation & Critique Paper Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried In reference to the statement, the author in essence questions the actuality of a “true war story,” which is also sustained by the fact that according to Tim, his story is merely a dream.”O’Brien creates […]
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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Things They Carried — The Disposition of Truth and Fiction in O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”

The Disposition of Truth and Fiction in O'brien’s "The Things They Carried"

• Categories: The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien

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Words: 1574 |

Pages: 3.5 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 1574 | Pages: 3.5 | 8 min read

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