The novel ‘things they carried’ talks about a story of men in Alpha company which is owned by a squad of soldiers in the Vietnam War. The story cuts through the haze of narrating war in a romantic way in order to depict the men involved as loyal, heroic, and afraid and to sum it up- humane. The narrator in the novel takes the reader through the list of things that his fellow men and soldiers carried in their missions. Some of these things were tangible while others were intangible. Some of the most candid intangible things include but not limited to guilt, fear and regret while the tangible things included physical items such as morphine to relieve their emotional and physical pain, M-16 rifles and match boxes to mention but a few. Throughout the novel, the same characters reappear in different scenes/ stories. All the characters are pretty interesting to analyze but this particular analysis will focus on Tim O’Brien, who is the protagonist in the novel. He symbolizes two major themes in the novel which are storytelling and memory.
O’Brien, being the narrator of ‘things they carried’ takes the readers through a series of events that took all the soldiers to the war in Vietnam. He was a young foot soldier in the said war and he was also a member of the Alpha Company. He also takes the fictional persona of the novel’s writer who is also known as O’Brien. The writer is also a middle age man with a middle class background from the Midwestern thus his writing values are well informed. In the novel, O’Brien is a very exciting character who is carrying a series of intangible things including guilt, fear, lust for blood and curiosity. For all the direct or personal stories in the novel, he is the main source of the reader and he gives a full account of what happens when people believe that something is either factual or fiction by evoking mixed feelings to the readers. Triggering such feelings to the readers help they relate with the story personally. They are able to feel the pain, the fear and the guilt that the soldiers felt in Vietnam and this makes the story more captivating and at the same time real.
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O’Brien is seen in three different stages of story development in this novel and this makes him a very important character for both the writer and the readers. He is depicted as the writer, the narrator and the soldier. This is to mean that he takes up three different roles in the novel which makes him a center of interest. The most interesting bit about the three characters is that they possess different views, even if they are one person. Their thoughts, feelings and emotions differ throughout the story because they are in tension with each other. O’Brien’s goal as both the writer and the narrator is to stress on these tensions. For instance, each of the three characters view and confront death differently because, O’Brien the narrator learned to accept and come to terms with death at a very young age, O’Brien the soldier tries to uncover and understand that lesson more in order to overcome death in the Vietnamese war and O’Brien the writer tries to connect these two concepts and approaches of death to illustrate and stress on how important memory is when it comes to understanding death. This deep connection between the characters is very important because it helps the readers understand death and loss. The conflict that O’Brien feels when he tries to understand and bring together these two different phases of his life creates a more vivid understanding of what death and loss feels like. Moreover, the conflict and tension between the three characters depicted by O’Brien is a manifestation of guilt and pain which are the two characteristics that cryptically motivates O’Brien the soldier to strive to get well while at the same time creating a reservoir for his quality storytelling.
It is also very important to note that throughout the novel, O’Brien creates an autobiography of personal war because he keeps on reflecting and questioning the choices he made as a soldier and he invites the readers in the scene by helping them do the same. For instance, in one scene, he describes himself as a failure and a coward and then he turns to the reader to get views on what they think of him at that point and what they would do were they in his situation. He says, “I was a coward. I went to the war.” This is a clear description that O’Brien the narrator is pulling the readers into an intimate relationship with O’Brien the soldier by engaging them in a really deep personal dialogue with each other. In another scene, he said “ I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” This shows how much the narrator wants to engage the reader to feel it as the soldier felt it. It shows that O’Brien the narrator is more concerned about making the readers’ part of his story in Vietnam. This kind of engagement helps the reader’s understand the characters better.
In conclusion, O’Brien is depicted as a supper character but he is pre occupied with memories and he is somehow unable to readjust to his normal civilian life because somehow he cannot forget the experience he had in Vietnam. He tries to make a case that his transition from war back to his normal life was easy but the readers cannot help but notice that he exhibits post-traumatic stress symptoms like isolation, depression, nightmares and anxiety reactions in his comments such as “I survived, but it's not a happy ending.” Or “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. ” He tries to confront these recurrent experiences by writing and narrating the events of trauma that he encountered as a way of releasing the chaos and disorientation he still feels thirty years later. He chooses to look for a resolution through memory and not denial. The novel gives the depressed character an emotional and imaginary home.
