Liam Sullivan
Hr. 7
Mrs. Nohner
5/31/12
An Unconventional War Story
Imagine yourself lying down in a bunker; rain coming down in sheets and you’re taking enemy fire. It’s chaos and you have no idea what to do. The problem with this image is that you don’t feel the water and the fear. A story can only do so much, but unless you’ve experienced war first hand it’s impossible to know how it feels. Those who haven’t fought can’t grasp what the soldiers go through. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien makes the reader feel like they’re there while it’s happening; it makes you feel like you know what war is. O’Brien expresses the themes of war and makes the reader experience war through his writing style and chapter set up.
War is chaotic and crazy. It’s hard to feel that unless you’ve experienced it first hand. O’Brien uses many separate stories that jump around to portray the chaos of war. He writes in the style of metafiction to skew the lines between reality and fiction. Just how war plays on the minds of the soldiers, the blending of fiction and reality play with the readers mind, making the reader second-guess on what’s real and what isn’t. “ As a result, the stories become epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the ways of telling a story can be viewed from many different angles and visions.” Calloway-web.
The unconventional structure of the individual stories and the stories as a whole reinforces the book’s ambiguity. Calloway-web. This ambiguity stresses another theme of the novel, the ambiguity of war. The reader’s mind is forced to struggle to wrap its mind around the messages in the book. They must go past the surface and past the entertaining stories to see what lies deeper within the texts. Just like war, O’Brien makes his novel ambiguous. This brings the reader closer to what really happens in war and the psychological struggles that soldiers must overcome. “It was a sad thing to watch. Definitely no the old Rat Kiley. His whole personality seemed out of kilter.” O’Brien 210. This quote explains what happens when you’re constantly on your toes and the emotional tolls that war takes. Using personal stories that aren’t true or a lie, but somewhere in-between draws the reader to feel the chaos of war.
O’Brien has a unique way of getting his point across. The Things They Carried portrays the theme that war is unconventional and has unconventional happenings through his unconventional style of writing. In chapters like Spin and Lives Of The Dead O’Brien starts with a “(S)tatement that the rest of the chapter throws into question. “The War wasn’t all terror and violence,” the narrator tells us, “Sometimes things could almost get sweet”. What follows, however, is a series of vignettes that are anything but “sweet.”” Blyn-web. This style of writing shows the contradictions of war and how unconventional it is for people to be killing each other over a war that many don’t think was worth fighting. The way that O’Brien combines unconventional and chaotic styles in his writing brings the reader deeper into the story, and makes them experience the stories and therefore the war.
O’Brien uses his unconventional style of writing to invite the reader to fully experience the war and express the recurring themes of war in his novel The Things They Carried. Like O’Brien says “Vietnam was full of strange stories, some improbable, some well beyond that, but the stories that will last forever are those that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane.” O’Brien 85. These are the stories that people really connect with. O’Brien blends the line between reality and fiction, allowing people to really get deep into the story and connect with the characters and to experience the war.
Works Cited
Blyn, Robin. “O’Brien’s THE THINGS THEY CARRIED.” Explicator 61.3
(2003): 189. Academic Search Premier. Web. 30 May 2012
Calloway, Catherine. “ ‘How To Tell A True War Story’: Metafiction In The Things They Carried.” Critique 36.4 (1995): 249. Academic Search Premier. Web. 23 May 2012.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990. Print.