BookTalk.org

Ch. 1: The Things They Carried

Please use this thread for discussing this chapter.

The opening line of this novel includes the word carried. O'Brien digs right in and begins to list all the things the young men carried with them in Vietnam; figuratively and literally. The repetition of the word carry is powerful and instructive. We all walk around with our personal burdens, our own histories, our generations history, and our own version of the larger culture into which we were born.

Note: For unsuspecting readers it is sometimes hard to remember this is a novel because Tim O'Brien names the narrator Tim O'Brien. I believe he does this intentionally to blur the line between fiction and memoir (non-fiction) in an attempt to get nearer the truth.

O'Brien has certainly blurred the line between fiction and memoir. I'm glad you pointed this out because I have been struggling with this fact all along as I move from one war story to the next. It sure reads like a memoir.

Maybe we can uncover a little about the author to see how he came up with the ideas for some of these stories. Is there real truth to some of these or is he simply using creative writing to teach us about the Vietnamese war?

If someone finds the answer to this question before me please post it here. But what does O'Brien mean when he dedicates this book to the men of Alpha Company? Aren't those men fictitious? Is he trying to tell us that those soldiers became very real to him over the course of writing these stories or were they real and the stories are about them?

Tim O'Brien really was in the Vietnam War and some of the stories are true or fictionalized version of real things that happened to him. Later today I will find more information about O'Brien with citations (if I can).

The book is often used as an example of a technique for preparing to write a novel. Aside from the previously noted insights in this thread, the "lists" are pretty standard fare for writing students as they build their characters. An instructor might ask a student to take one character and make five different lists; 1) what is in their medicine cabinet 2) what is in thr trunk of their car 3) what is in the box under their bed and so on to create in the writer's mind some sense of what this person collects, hides, uses or whatever. I read the book before having it assigned for this purpose and after the second time through I began to really appreciate the use of lists. As you read the book, notice the difference in the things each soldier carries and see if it says anything about how they fit into the story.

The most important thing carried by each of the soldier is the psychological and emotional burden that comes with fighting in a war. O'Brien does an excellent job by seemingly just tossing these issues on the list with everything else that is standard issue for the soldier, he shows that no one walks away from war unscathed.

Jeremy wrote:O'Brien does an excellent job by seemingly just tossing these issues (psychological and emotional) on the list with everything else that is standard issue for the soldier, he shows that no one walks away from war unscathed.

I inserted the parentheses to clarify Jeremy's meaning, since I had not included his previous sentence in the above quote. After all that, I should have just quoted the whole thing. Jeremy's quote hits on one of the things I like best about O'Brien's book. The idea that what we carry literally and figuratively reflects who we are and what our life situation is. It is very powerful. O'Brien lists and lists and drives the point home hard; which highlights the absurdity of what the US soldiers faced in Vietnam. I really like the use of repetition through out the book. It could get to be too much, but he changes how he uses it just in time, so as not to spoil the effect or the narrative.

I copied the following from Wikipedia:

One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "metafiction," his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced; while that is not unusual, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to the distinction between fiction and fact is extraordinary: In the chapter "Good Form" in The Things They Carried, O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes," which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictive.

I really like this explanation of the mixing of truth and fiction in a novel. The bold is of course mine. O'Brien uses metafiction masterfully. He opens the door on a philosophical discussion that is activity being debated in History departments everywhere. Who's version of history gets recorded? Who gets to do the recording? What exactly is the truth? Who's version of what happened are we going to record as history? And the biggest question of all, can any one person actually tell the factual "truth"? And his question: Are the facts the only, the whole truth? In later chapters O'Brien illustrates the problem of truth telling beautifully.

I know I have posted on the Greek concept of truth before, but it seem very relevant to the discussion of O'Brien's novel.

Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) is the Greek word for "truth", and like the English word implies sincerity as well as factuality or reality. The literal meaning of the word ἀ