The Things They Carried - Term Paper Example

Analyzing the writing style and salient narrative elements evident in Tim O’Brien’s literary masterpiece “The Things They Carried” Abstract In this paper the author Tim O’Brien’s writing style, tone, theme and message of the short story named The Things They Carried is examined. The analysis concluded that the writer’s approach is a fusion of facts and fiction to grab the attention and interest of the readers. The writer has used a frank and matter-of-factly tone throughout the story and uses his creative imagination and power on language to keep the readers engrossed till the end. He also commendably creates an exclusive bond between the characters and readers. O’Brien intelligently puts forth his view-point, which is that soldiers carry plenty of intangible burdens in the minds. These burdens are far heavier than the enormous ammunitions and essential items that they carry on their bodies. The story also presents a conflict between love and war and the importance of drawing a line between reality and fantasies during wartime. Analyzing the writing style and salient narrative elements evident in Tim O’Brien’s literary masterpiece “The Things They Carried” The list of American literature’s most influential short stories ever written will be incomplete without the inclusion of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. The story was first published independently in Esquire and in 1990 it was officially included in O’Brien’s short stories collectiontitled “The Things They Carried.” Houghton Mifflin, USA published the book The Things They Carried, which contained the author’s semi-autobiographical accounts on the Vietnam War. In this context, the short story The Things They Carried provided a snippet view of the lives, mindset, guilt, fears, aspirations and psychological dilemmas of the foot soldiers of an American platoon marching in Than Khe, Vietnam. This particular story received critical acclaim and anoverwhelmingly positive response from readers. In 1987 Ann Beattie includedit in “The Best American Short Stories”collection and RoberDiYanni made it a part of the second installment of “Literature: Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama”. It received numerous prestigious awards including Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize;France’s Prix du MeilleurLivreEtranger Award and was among the finalists for Pulitzer Prize. This story is regarded as the most impactful literary work written in the backdrop of a war especially due to the exclusive writing style O’Brien adopted. The objective of this paper is to analyze the writing style, theme, tone and salient elements that distinguished The Things They Carried from the other literatures on war. The focus or central point/theme of the story is on highlighting the varying emotional dilemmas and psychological burdens that soldiers carryas well as acknowledging that the primary task of every soldier is to distinguish between fact and reality. Usually only the heroic events and the devastating results of war are narrated in a story about war but this story is all about explaining the emotional weight that a soldier carries and the recurrent conflict between love and war that he faces every day in his mind. Tim O’Brien has tackled this theme from a philosophical and psychological perspective but very intelligently just by listing the items that every soldier carried.For instance, in this one sentence, O’Brien puts together both physical and psychological burdens of first lieutenant and platoon leader Jimmy Cross. “Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars…… and the responsibility for the lives of his men” (O’Brien, 1990).Then by the end when Lavender dies, O’Brien shows the remorse and guilt that Cross feels over the death and the realization of his priorities during wartime. O’Brien also mentions that Ted Lavender, at the time of his death, carried “thirty-four rounds…more than twenty pounds of ammunition…. toilet paper and tranquilizers…plus the unweighed fear” (O’Brien, 2009).In this way, throughout the story, O’Brien explains the visible and invisible burdens that the foot soldiers carried during Vietnam War and provides the reader an insight into the psyche of every soldier alongwith depicting the impact of war from a humanistic perspective. The tone of the story is straightforward and simple and O’Brien impressively established his point that soldiers carried enormous intangible burdens such as memories, desires and fears without using heavyweight wordings. The author, being a soldier himself during the Vietnam War, uses a frank tone throughout the story and focuses on presenting the soldiers insight, guilt, fears, weaknesses, and longings separately to sketch their personalities. For achieving this task, O’Brien narrates the list of things soldiers carried as a team and then describes specific soldier’s items so that the readers have an idea about the character’s personality. For instance, O’Brien described that Jimmy Cross carried “letters from a girl named Martha,” Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, Carried an illustrated New Testament” (O’Brien 2009).Tim O’Brien’s emphasis on keeping the narration straightforward and understandable becomes evident by the explanations he provides for understanding certain new terms. For instance, he explains the term “Hump” in a very easy to comprehend manner by writing: “To carry something was to "hump" it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross humped his love for Martha up the hills….In its intransitive form, "to hump," meant "to walk," or "to march," but it implied burdens far beyond the intransitive “ (O’Brien, 2009). That is how O’Brien attempted to give an insight on the personality type and preferences of all the soldiers but in a completely graspable and engaging manner without making the story bland and boring. He uses his dramatization prowess at several points in the story to keep the reader engaged such as the part when Jimmy Cross imagines Martha standing barefoot on the Jersey shoreline. If his writing style is analyzed, then the first thing that instantly strikes is what Abby Werlock described as “a precise control on language” (2009). Tim O’Brien wrote simple sentences that are easy to understand and a reader can comprehend the state of mind of the soldiers who are constantly fighting their inner desires and demands. He seems to be totally in command of his story and presents the readers an overview of the emotional state of the soldiers in an easy-going yet intensive manner. O’Brien employed aphilosophical perspectiveon the things soldiers usually carry apart from stuff that accounts for “function of rank and field specialty” but without usingstrange concepts or theories at any point. He explained intangible items so easily in this particular phrase: ‘Grief, terror, love and longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight” (O’Brien 2009). Meta-fiction is a technique that writers use to combine facts with fiction in order to make the story more compelling, interesting, engaging and thought provoking. Robert Scholes described meta-fiction as “fabulation or ethically controlled fantasy” (Bloom, 2009). An analysis of The Things They Carried reveals that Tim O’Brien has used this technique to convey his message. There are stories within stories that help the readers connect to each soldier independently and feel sentiments for the whole platoon as a team. As per the norms of meta-fictional texts, the line has not been clearly drawn between fact and fiction in this story. Although O’Brien has narrated true experiences in The Things They Carried, but the text very obviously juggles between real-life events and dramatization to make his narration effective. Harold Bloom affirms the use of meta-fiction by saying “as O’Brien’s extensive focus on storytelling indicates, The Things They Carried is also a work of contemporary meta-fiction” (2009). For instance, in the part where Cross receives a pebble from Martha, which she found “on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated” is a brilliantly written piece that incorporates meta-fiction. Inger Christensen believes that "the novelist's message" happens to be an integral element in a meta-fictional text (Grabes, Diller &Isernhagen, 1988). On the other hand Patricia Waugh explained that in fictional writing “Metafiction self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Eysteinsson, 1992).This means encouraging the reader to think and derive answers on their own is another key reason behind using meta-fiction in text. Both these elements of meta-fiction that have been pointed out as fundamental by Christensen and Waugh are evident in the above mentioned example from The Things They Carried. Martha’s letters and pebble act as artifacts that further accentuate the storytelling. The usage of tide and waves and the mentioning of togetherness and separation emit an ambiguous aura and compels the reader to conclude about Cross and Martha’s relationship status. Ciocia validates that “the relationship between storytelling and truth together with other crucial issues such as...the interplay between memory and imagination is one of O’Brien’s recurrent concerns” (2012). The main message that O’Brien effectively puts forth through meta-fiction is that no matter how much burdensome physical or tangible items may feel to a human, the heaviest burden is of the invisible or tangible items, which no one can escape from. Along with mentioning of things/items that the soldiers carried on varying missions, the author also adds the psychological burdens that the soldiers carried according to the nature of their mission. For instance, “On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds and ends. They all carried ghosts” (O’Brien, 2009). On missions to “destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes” the soldiers carried worries and queries “about odd things----will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out?” (O’Brien, 2009) The continuous referral to the physical and psychological things portrays the message of this story very clearly. A point of emphasis that is clearly evident from Tim O’Brien’s storytelling style is that he wanted to create a bond between the characters and the readers. This, he achieves, by using several techniques. He attempts to provide an insight into the psyche of the soldiers by mentioning the specific items each soldier psychologically carried toinform the readers about his beliefs and desires. The mentioning of superstitions and memories is an example in this context. O’Brien explains the bond that the soldiers shared from these lines: “They shared the weight of memory….they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds” (O’Brien, 2009). The intention of depicting the bondage between soldiers is an attempt to develop a bond with the readers and to create a sense of empathy for the soldiers. Another trick used by O’Brien to make the readers feel the rigor that the foot soldiers underwent during Vietnam War was by describing the weight of every item that the soldiers carried. The readers get to know the weights of grenades, arms and ammunition and all prominent tangible items that soldiers carried in pound throughout the story, and this aspect lets them realize the hard time they endured while marching in Than Khe. However, since meta-fiction is a dominant approach employed in this story, the information about weights is used to make the readers realize that emotional burdens were heavier than these physical burdens. The author’s command on the language is firm throughout the story and he picks such metaphors/symbols to explain his point that are easily understandable and relatable yet encourageinquisition. StefaniaCiocia claims that O’Brien is “a wordsmith with a clear interest in exploring the mechanisms of language as well as in testing the technical and formal limits and the sense-making potential of hischosen medium, narrative writing” (2012). This is the primary reason due to which O’Brien’s works have received such immense popularity and critical acclaim. No matter how expansively he tests the technical and formal limits, the sense-making aspect is never overlooked in the narration, which is why his story becomes relatable and comprehendible. For instance, O’Brien uses such highly imaginative metaphors to depict the superfluity of emotional weightage that soldiers carried by comparing it with “the land itself... Vietnam…the sky…the whole atmosphere…the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity” (O’Brien, 2009). Since these instances cannot be weighed so O’Brien includedthem to acknowledge the fact that the burdens of soldiers cannot be measured and neither the limitlessness of their desires, imaginations and dreams. O’Brien’s writing is definitely tricky yet it cannot be termed as confusing, dull, or the events seem to be dragging at any point in the story, which is because of the conversational approach that O’Brien has employed in The Things They Carried. “They were actors and the war came at them in 3-D” is an example of the frankness that the author has employed in the text (O’Brien, 2009).Harold Bloom states that “O’Brien is far more of a literary trickster than he acknowledges” (2009). All the short stories included in The Things They Carried, the book, are based on either O’Brien’s autobiographical accounts or memoirs of soldiers but fiction has been incorporated into each story in such a way that the reader cannot distinguish between reality and author’s imaginary trickery. It can be stated that O’Brien’s writing style is simple, matter-of-factly, explanatory and at times evasive. Underneath the alibi of frankness, understandability, fictional camouflaging and subtletylies an urge to introduce the readers to the impacts and tribulations of war. By pointing out that grief, terror, longing, death and love are intangible but possess their own proportion of mass and gravity O’Brien has tried to present a completely unique perspective on human psyche. In this story, although the characters are important but far more important is the perception that the author wanted to convey. He tried to acknowledge the fact that during war, every incident cannot be viewed as epic or heroic because those fighting or marching during wartime are also humans having unimaginable emotional burdens. They can commit mistakes, and have their own share of shame and guilt but eventually it is the will to serve and the courage to stay determined that takes over all the negativities, longings, and hurdles. References Bloom, H. (2009).The Things They Carried. (pp. 90-100). Infobase Publishing. Ciocia, S. (2012).Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O'brien and the Power of Storytelling. (pp. 10-20). Liverpool University Press. Eysteinsson, A. (1992). The Concept of Modernism. (p. 110). Cornell University Press. Grabes, H., Diller, H., &Isernhagen, H. (1988).Real: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature. (Vol. 5, p. 286). Walter de Gruyter. O'Brien, T. (2009).The Things They Carried. (pp. 1-25). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Werlock, A. H. P. (2009). Companion to Literature: Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story. (p. 493). Infobase Publishing. Read More