Koki 1
Jack Koki
Mr. Oravec
AP Literature and Composition
11 November 2014
A True War Story: A Literary Analysis of The Things They Carried
“I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa
and summa cum laude, all the credentials, but after seven months in the bush I realized that those
high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily
realities. I’d turned mean inside” (O’Brien 190).
This quote from Tim O’Brien’s 1990 novel The Things They Carried highlights
protagonist Tim O’Brien’s rather ironic transition from life as a college graduate in the United
States to a soldier fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. Through his college years, O’Brien
attempted to ignore the Vietnam War; in fact, he even openly opposed it through his regular
attendance of peace vigils and war protests. After graduating St. Paul’s Macalester College with
a myriad of academic honors, he was accepted to a Ph.D. program at Harvard University’s
School of Government and quickly committed to the prestigious school. However, merely two
weeks after graduating from Macalester, O’Brien’s aspiration to attend Harvard came to a
screeching halt when he received his draft notice to serve in Vietnam. Ironically enough, O’Brien
was called upon to fight in the same war he openly protested and opposed. Though conflicted,
O’Brien enlisted in the military and was shipped off to Vietnam. After serving in the country for
months on end, the everyday realities of fighting and killing consumed his anti-war train of
thought, which accounts for the “meanness” he felt inside.
Koki 2
Irony is just one literary device that O’Brien embodies into his novel, and there are plenty
more that he uses to deepen its meaning. There exists a great deal of parallelism between the
author and protagonist who both share the same name: Tim O’Brien. This ultimately allows the
author to take on a persona in his novel and seemingly speak for himself with his authorial voice.
Written largely in the first person point of view, protagonist Tim O’Brien recounts the sequence
of events and actions that occurred in his life prior to and during the War in Vietnam.
Furthermore, the author’s syntactical awareness and unique style allow readers to develop an
idea the war’s surreal nature and the swift occurrence of death. As the novel’s main plot
progresses, there are certain subplots that arise among certain characters. Through multiple
flashbacks, O’Brien highlights the past lives of certain characters prior to the war as well as their
motivations for surviving the cause as well as joining it in the first place. Along with the
prevalence of various themes, symbols, and motifs, Tim O’Brien’s incorporation of numerous
literary devices in his novel make it a stellar piece of modern literature.
Author Tim O’Brien was born on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota to an insurance
salesman and an elementary school teacher. While growing up in Worthington, Minnesota, his
hobbies included conducting magic tricks and reading books at the local library. O’Brien’s father
served his country in World War II, fighting on the Japanese front near Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
After the war was over, his father regularly wrote articles regarding his personal accounts of
fighting in the New York Times. His father’s recollections of his military service fascinated
young Tim O’Brien, and O’Brien admitted that his father’s war stories were what ultimately
motivated him to pursue a career in the field of writing. O’Brien decided to major in political
sciences when he went to college; this was around the time when the Vietnam War was
beginning to brew overseas. He opposed the war until he received a draft notice calling for his
Koki 3
service in the region. Though he had mixed feelings towards the war, O’Brien decided to enlist
in the armed forces and fight on the other side of the world. After serving his country in South
Vietnam, he returned home to the United States and recounted his military service. The war had
significantly impacted his life, so O’Brien decided to devote himself to his former passion of
writing. He took several years to write his fictional novel, and it was not until 1990 that the
finalized version of The Things They Carried was published. The collection of stories explores
O’Brien’s life before and during the war as well as how he came to view the war after returning
home to America.
The protagonist in The Things They Carried shares the same name as the author: Tim
O’Brien. The author claims to have no affiliation whatsoever with the protagonist in the story,
and there are some minor differences in the lives of the author and the protagonist to back his
claim. Nevertheless, there are simply too many similarities between the two to ignore. They grew
up in the same hometown of Worthington, Minnesota, attended Macalester College, opposed the
Vietnam War until receiving draft notices to serve in the conflict, reluctantly enlisted to serve
their country, and even returned home after their service to become writers that describe their
experiences in Vietnam in multiple stories and novels. The parallelism between the lives of the
author and his protagonist make sense, for critics commonly agree that “Based on his own
combat exposure, O’Brien [himself] delves into…human experience as he writes not only of
what actually happened, but also the emotional and psychological impact of the war” (“Tim”). In
effect, Tim O’Brien models his protagonist’s background based on his life story with only
minute differences so he can retell his past experiences without his readers knowing if anything
he says is necessarily true. That is precisely why this novel, while it does recount many of the
author’s encounters in Vietnam, is considered fictional prose as opposed to nonfiction prose.
Koki 4
With this in mind, O’Brien often takes on a persona in his novel and seemingly speaks
for himself on certain events that happened in the war, otherwise known as his authorial voice.
One instance of O’Brien’s interjection of his own ideas appears in the opening sentence of “The
Lives of Dead Men”, the last story in the novel. The sentence reads “But this is too true: stories
can save us” (O’Brien 213). In the novel, protagonist Tim O’Brien is the character who is
narrating the story. However, due to the parallelism between the author and his protagonist, a
vast majority of the novel’s events can be considered the author’s personal experiences he
encountered in South Vietnam. Therefore, any advice and suggestions given by the narrator can
also be considered to be coming from the author of the novel as well. In effect, author Tim
O’Brien injects himself into his novel and seemingly advises his readers that “stories can save
us” through his authorial voice.
On that note, O’Brien wrote The Things They Carried largely from a first person point of
view. The events that occur throughout the story are mostly told through the eyes of the
protagonist and narrator Tim O’Brien. In first person point of view, a person tells about things he
or she has seen, done, spoken, heard, thought, and also learned about in other ways. In other
words, the author wrote the novel such that the protagonist tells about all the things he saw,
heard, and learned as a result of serving his country in Vietnam. However, due to all the striking
similarities the author shares with his protagonist, readers can infer that the O’Brien himself is
the one narrating the story. This is typical behavior for authors with prior military service to
incorporate themselves in their work; Tina Chen supports this notion in saying that “O’Brien's
compulsion to revisit his war experience through fiction is not unique” (Chen). O’Brien was
obviously obsessed with revisiting his war experiences; if O’Brien would have written his novel
in any form of third person point of view, readers would have a much harder time with
Koki 5
identifying the connection O’Brien shared with his protagonist’s views on the war, and by
extension, his personal views of his personal war experiences in Vietnam.
Nevertheless, there are certain instances where Tim O’Brien crafts his novel so that the
story is told from the accounts of O’Brien’s platoon members. In “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien
does just that; he temporarily sacrifices his role of narrator and allows Kiowa and Azar to narrate
the story of how protagonist Tim O’Brien killed a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade while
in combat. The story focused by and large on the great deal of damage that the grenade dealt on
the dead soldier’s entire body, particularly his face, in great detail. O’Brien was horrified by
what remained of the soldier after the grenade went off, and knowing that he was responsible for
the body’s destruction was too much for him to mentally bear. As a result, the author hands off
the narrator role to the protagonist’s squad mates to distance his protagonist from the mayhem he
caused to end the soldier’s life. In doing so, the author captures his protagonist’s sense of guilt
and accountability for his actions; after all, the burden of ending a human life would remain with
the protagonist for the rest of his life.
Tim O’Brien’s style throughout The Things They Carried helps his readers to attain a
better understanding of just how quickly soldiers die in combat, especially through his
syntactical awareness and craft of his sentences. One of the first deaths to occur in the novel is
that of Ted Lavender in the book’s first story entitled “The Things They Carried”. After
returning from using the bathroom, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is in the middle of walking back to
his men when Ted Lavender is suddenly shot in the head and killed by a Vietnamese soldier.
When describing how quickly Lavender’s body hit the ground, the author crafted the sentence to
be “Like cement…I swear to God—boom, down. Not a word” (O’Brien 16). Rather than writing
some long, drawn-out sentence to describe the chaotic situation, O’Brien resorts to writing quick
Koki 6
and abrupt sentences and phrases to describe how quickly his body fell to the ground. O’Brien’s
decisive word choice forms sentences that are straight to the point. If he would have added any
more words to the sentence, the long and drawn-out nature would have detracted from O’Brien’s
intentions of portraying Ted Lavender’s death as a quick and speedy incident.
Lavender’s death was the first of many cases where O’Brien and his platoon suffered a
loss of one of their own in the jungle. In the novel, the main plot concerns protagonist Tim
O’Brien’s platoon of soldiers, the experiences they witness and share together while serving in
Vietnam, and the ways in which they cope with the experiences after the War in Vietnam.
Taking place in mostly in Vietnam but also in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Iowa, the novel
highlights the various events that occurred prior to and during their service in Vietnam, particular
in the eyes of the protagonist. After the exposition revealed O’Brien’s background, the rising
action hastily arose when O’Brien received his draft notice to serve in Vietnam. Ambivalent
about enlisting in the military, the protagonist makes the ultimate decision to serve his country
and enlists to defend his country as an infantryman. The climax of the novel’s main plot occurs
when O’Brien and his platoon members witness the deaths of friendly (and even enemy) soldiers
at various sections of the book, beginning with the death of Ted Lavender. From there, the
young, feeble-minded soldiers must cope with the losses of their own squad members along with
the immense guilt of helplessly watching others die on the battlefield. Once their service in
Vietnam officially came to an end, O’Brien and what remained of his platoon returned to the
United States with the war’s events fresh on their minds. As part of the falling action, O’Brien
settles down in Massachusetts and writes stories that reflect upon the gruesome and dreadful
events that he witnessed while fighting overseas. Interestingly enough, the author provides no
immediate resolution to wrap up the main plot in The Things They Carried. This is most likely
Koki 7
due to the fact that protagonist and author Tim O’Brien never came to terms with what happened
in Vietnam. Like many so many other soldiers who returned home troubled by the war’s
undertakings, O’Brien came home with a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
According to psychiatrists specializing in veterans who develop this disorder, “the ultimate key
to successful management of PTSD lies in the veteran’s narrating his trauma…[psychiatrists]
find expressing the trauma in a cohesive form as vital to the patient's recovery” (Rolen). In other
words, writing articles and novels regarding their war experiences allowed the author and the
protagonist to find a certain degree of peace of mind with everything that happened during the
War in Vietnam; this was as close as the two could come to “resolving” the atrocities of the war.
While the events mentioned in the main plot transpire throughout The Things They
Carried, the author also integrates multiple instances of secondary lines of action that comment
directly and obliquely on the main plot. Specifically, these subplots concerning the pre-war lives
of two of the novel’s characters—Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and protagonist Tim O’Brien—
provide information necessary to understanding Cross’s motivation to make it out of the war
alive and O’Brien’s motivation for enlisting in the armed forces and serving his country over in
Vietnam.
In the first story entitled “The Things They Carried”, narrator and protagonist Tim
O’Brien lists off the various things that he and the soldiers of his platoon carried at all times
while in combat. He lists off all the typical equipment a soldier carries, including guns, radios,
knives, grenades, and so forth along with each object’s physical mass; he also calls attention to
the emotional burdens the soldiers developed as a result of leaving home as they knew it and
traveling halfway around the world to fight in a hostile country. However, the other key
component that dominates the content of this first story is the past life of Lieutenant Jimmy
Koki 8
Cross. While still in college and prior to receiving his draft notice, Cross had a crush on a girl
that he referred to as Martha. He was obsessed with the girl and fantasized about her constantly
in the beginning of the novel. At all times, he even carried a picture of her playing volleyball; the
story explained how he acquired the picture in a flashback where Martha gave Cross the picture
prior to his departure to Vietnam. He regularly wrote her letters from the battlefield and was
obsessed with her pureness and constantly pondered on whether or not the girl was a virgin. This
is significant in that the war he was fighting in was filled with ghastly, dreadful, and horrific
accounts of death and slaughter. Thus, Martha’s virginity symbolized her untouched and pure
state, which chiefly contrasts with the everyday occurrences of war. Therefore, Cross became
motivated to survive the combat in Vietnam and make it back home in hopes of one day
establishing a relationship with Martha.
As a superior officer, the thought of a relationship with Martha clearly distracted him
from leading his squad, and Cross came to recognize this at the cost of one of his men. When
Ted Lavender was suddenly shot and killed, Lieutenant Cross blamed the death largely on
himself for letting the thoughts of Martha compromise his duties as a superior officer of the
squad. From that point onward, Cross cleared the thoughts of Martha from his mind and even
burned the picture of the girl. Nearly twenty years later in the novel’s second story “Love”, Cross
comes to realize that his fantasized relationship with Martha was merely a verisimilitude.
Though she ended each letter with “Love, Martha”, the feelings Cross felt for Martha at the time
were not, and never were, mutual. As a result, the guilt of letting a girl who was never interested
in him distract him from leading the platoon still lingered over Cross nearly twenty years after
the occasion; he felt responsible for Lavender’s death and feels as if the entire incident could
have been prevented if only he kept Martha out of his train of thought.
Koki 9
Just like Cross, protagonist Tim O’Brien is also mentioned in a one of the novel’s
subplots. This particular subplot accounts for O’Brien’s motivation, rooted in his life before
enlisting in the military, to fight in Vietnam. In one of the novel’s stories called “On the Rainy
River”, the author describes O’Brien’s hesitance to enlist in the armed forces upon receiving his
draft notice in June of 1968. After all, in his college years, O’Brien was morally against the War
in Vietnam and actively protested in rallies to demonstrate his discontent for the cause. In a
desperate attempt to avoid being drafted, he leaves his home town in Minnesota in a hurry and
heads for Canada; he considers Canada to be a safe haven, for United States officials would be
unable to forcibly make O’Brien join the war effort if he left the country. He stops at a motel
called the Tip Top Lodge to rest one day while making his dash for Canada and meets Elroy, the
owner of the establishment. On O’Brien’s last day at the Tip Top Lodge, Elroy takes O’Brien out
on the lake. They launch their craft on United States territory, but Elroy intentionally drives the
boat far beyond the United States/Canada border line. When Elroy anchors the boat, the vessel is
only a short swimming distance away from Canadian soil. O’Brien is torn between whether or
not he should leap from the vessel and swim to Canada, but he ultimately decides that he cannot
go through with fleeing the United States. O’Brien did not let his cowardice get the best of him
because in his mind, by fleeing the United States to avoid military service, he would feel
eternally guilty for shaming himself and his family’s name. Even though he would hate every
moment of his service in Vietnam, O’Brien the returned from the lake to Tip Top Lodge, drove
back home to Minnesota, and left for Vietnam shortly after his experience with Elroy.
Consequently, the fear of shame and dishonor serves as Tim O’Brien’s motivation to join the
United States’ war effort in Vietnam.
Koki 10
The fear of shame and guilt is the prevalent theme in multiple stories in The Things They
Carried. First and foremost, it served as the protagonist’s motivation to join the Vietnam War
effort. Tim O’Brien succumbed to these pressures which ultimately led him to enlist as an
infantryman in the United States military. Despite his reservations about the war, he decided to
serve his country in order to avoid scrutiny from his parents and fellow townspeople. After all,
the last thing he wanted was for everyone he knew and cared about to perceive him as
unpatriotic, cowardly, and spineless. Despite how people commonly argue that an individual
should not allow the perceptions of others to influence their course of action, the frank reality is
just the opposite: individuals allow the opinions of others to motivate their decisions all too often
in society. Also, in “The Man I Killed”, O’Brien feels shameful and especially guilty after killing
a Vietnamese soldier with a hand grenade. After witnessing the deaths of several of his platoon
members, the man came to symbolize how, once killed in combat, the label of “ally” or “enemy”
no longer served any meaning in war; O’Brien realizes that the man was a human just like
himself. This led him to sincerely contemplate about his actions that cut the man’s life short and
prevented him from living a future life. It also accounts for why the author temporarily relieves
the role of narrator from his protagonist and allows Kiowa and Azar to narrate this particular
story.
Another dominant aspect in the novel is the motif of storytelling. The Things They
Carried itself is Tim O’Brien’s method of telling his own stories regarding the implications and
hardships of his war service in Vietnam. Similarly, within the novel itself, the characters O’Brien
places in his book also tell stories amongst each other. From protagonist Tim O’Brien sharing his
stories of how he almost fled to Canada before he joined the military to Lieutenant Jimmy Cross
discussing his guilty conscience and resentment for Ted Lavender’s death with O’Brien twenty
Koki 11
years after their service together, this reoccurring topic of storytelling prevails in the novel.
However, “From his earliest writing, O’Brien… has been engaged in the effort to “tell a true war
story,” but in so doing he has also struggled to evaluate the attitudes that produced and were
produced by the Vietnam experience” (Wesley). In other words, the stories that Tim O’Brien
tells in his novel are not always the complete truth. His goal in storytelling is not to assess the
attitudes that society associates with the Vietnam War; rather, O’Brien aspires to alter the events
that really happened during his Vietnam service to make them more appropriately suited in his
novel. This is his underlying message in the story “How to Tell a True War Story” and is why he
names his protagonist after himself, makes his life almost exactly parallel to his own life, and
adds in miniscule differences to set them apart from one another.
Without Tim O’Brien’s wide variety of literary devices dispersed throughout his book,
The Things They Carried would not be the same literary work of art that it is today. From the
irony surrounding his views on war, to the way he parallels his protagonist’s life almost exactly
to his own, to his unique style and craft of the text, to the different themes and motivations he
reveals in multiple subplots, O’Brien’s motif of storytelling is perceived loud and clear by the
readers of his 1990 novel. Author Tim O’Brien perfected the way in which he shared his
personal Vietnam War experiences with the world; he certainly knew how to how to tell a true
war story.
Koki 12
Works Cited
Chen, Tina. “’Unraveling the deeper meaning’: exile and the embodied poetics of displacement
in Tim O’Brien’s 'The Things They Carried.’.” Contemporary Literature 39.1 (1998):
77+. Academic OneFile. Web. 9 Nov. 2014.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.
Rolen, Catherine. “Seeing signs and telling war stories: recognizing trauma symptoms and the
role of narrative in recovery.” War, Literature & The Arts 23.1 (2011). Academic
OneFile. Web. 10 Nov. 2014.
“Tim O’Brien (American writer).” 2013. Books & Authors. Gale. Gale Internal User. 9 Nov
2014. <http://bna.galegroup.com/bna/start.do?p=BNA&u=gale>.
Wesley, Marilyn. “Truth and fiction in Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things
They Carried.” College Literature 29.2 (2002): 1+. Academic OneFile. Web. 10 Nov.
2014.