1. The Things they Carried by Tim O’Brien is the story of a Vietnam veteran writing a book about his time in the war. He recollects on past experiences and the experiences of his fellow squad mates in the various chapters with him narrating as though he were going to be writing his book. Along the way he tells of the burdens that soldiers carry with them, physical but also emotional and mental, like guilt, fear, and anxiety. This helps him convey his messages about the burdens put on by warfare and why people tell stories. He tries to show that we tell stories so that we can keep alive the people and things that we’ve lose in our mind and in the minds of others, as the soldiers hope to do with their comrades. And about how with storytelling, if you want to effectively get a truth across, you often must use lies. For instance, when recollecting memories, while the major events may be true, the events leading up may be all made up, not to embellish, but so that the important ending is better understood.
2. The major theme of the novel is about burden that soldiers carry. They’re not just physical but emotional and psychological. Losing their friends and having the constant fear that they could be killed at any time has a toll of them, and they begin to be weighed down not just by their gear but by their minds as well. This causes soldiers in the story to shoot themselves to get out the war, joke about the deaths of others to try and seem unaffected, and even to commit suicide when they are home because they feel as though now they have no purpose and guilt weighing them down.
3. The tone in the novel is sad. He seems to solemnly be writing the stories and that it’s difficult for him to narrate the memories of himself and his comrades.
“If you weren’t humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and heat and endless paddies. Even deep in the bush, where you could die in any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist that caused stomach disorders. Well, you’d think, this isn’t so bad. And right when you’d hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you’d be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.”
Here we see him talking sarcastically almost to try and describe the fear that they felt, with a somber back tone as well.
“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war… it’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
Here O’Brien’s sadness come through when he writes about how people don’t care enough to even listen to their stories, and leave them to face them alone.
“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war.”
Here O’Brien writes about his sadness and how he felt cowardly for not running away from the war. Which is ironic, because that is cowardly as well, but he didn’t stay to do his duty, he stayed because he didn’t want people to think badly of him.
4. Some literary techniques important to this novel are irony, point of view, imagery, mood, and symbolism.
You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets and metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination of rounds, the while phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare.” It is very ironic for him to describe instruments of death like this as beautiful; though they bring death they also bring beauty. Confusion like this leads more to the confusion placed on the soldiers who are there.
Point of view is something very important to this story in every regard. The main character is ahead in time, writing his novel, though he flashes back to various events that happened to him and his comrades and tells of them from and omniscient third person. There are a also a few of his memories that he tells in first person. This allows the reader to see and feel the emotions of all the characters, but also in some intense situations get down and feel what O’Brien felt.
“He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole.” Here O’Brien creates a vivid image for the reader of the person he kills. It shows the burdens that the soldier feels, and how he remembers all the things that he has to do because of his job as 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 faceless responsibility and faceless grief.” Here the mood of grief is ever prevalent, and we see how O’Brien feels about seeing the dead, but being too afraid to look into their faces, and how that has haunted him more than anything else.
The Vietnamese boy that O’Brien killed two quotes ago is an important symbol. It symbolized how people feel about how people feel about the horrible things they see and do in war. O’Brien talks on and on about who he thought he was, how he thought he could be someone just like him and in blink of an eye he took his life. He is horrified by this, and cannot accept that he may have had part in taking the life of another, and though never tells how he feels, shows the grief and pain he feels.
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