One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves. With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America's most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
An Entertaining and Enlightening Introduction to Story Telling:
Sections of this book were assigned to me as coursework. What I read was so entertaining that I immediately purchased the book and had read and reread it within a weekend. I admit that I'd not have seen the depth of O'Brien's true literary genius had my professor not shed light on some of the subtle issues addressed herein (i.e. the retelling of The Lemon Tree story as a portrait of literary progression through history, etc.). Still, even without an appreciation of or interest in top quality literature, the... more info
never even received product:
i never even received what i ordered, which i had gotten from know hope auctions or something like that. i had to go to border's and buy it because i needed it for school. and the best part is i still got charged for it. very disappointing.
Inaccurate, misleading, and confusing:
Books are usually written a certain way; with a plot, set characters, conflicts, et cetera. The way Tim O'Brien portrays his story, The Things They Carried, is different than most books and his incorporation of truth and fiction tend to throw the reader off. Tim O'Brien constantly contradicts himself throughout the novel, and continually tells the reader that he or she won't be able to comprehend what he is trying to explain.
My first point I would like to present is the book is full of... more info
O'Brien Cuts To the Core Of Our Fragile Lives:
In The Things They Carried, Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien called upon his own wartime experiences, labeled them as fiction, and wrote one of the most emotionally potent books I've ever read. It's irrelevant to me how much of O'Brien's book "really happened" because O'Brien's words and stories in The Things They Carried deeply touched me. O'Brien wrote simply, but effectively. He tapped into real emotion and conveyed those emotions skillfully. With each and every short that made up a larger story with The... more info
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