The Things They Carried By Tim O'Brien - Essay Example

On Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” Fiction is a story, a plot, and a creative product of a mind. write for many reasons such as the need to give and explore their own opinions. Another purpose could be that writing gives writers a means to express inexpressible experiences and to give such experiences a sense of truth. These realistic stories often leave readers wondering where the boundaries of fiction and truth lie. One such writer and composition is Tim O’Brien and his book called “The Things They Carried”, a compilation of related short stories. Here, Tim O’Brien gives life to physical and emotional burdens that soldiers of the Vietnam War have to carry amidst their life before, during and after the war through his characters in the book. The writer Tim O’Brien fuses fact and fiction in the way he structures his characters and stories in the book. First and foremost, he names the main character and narrator of the story after himself. His character O’Brien, is a soldier turned writer after being discharged from Military duty like himself. Through his story character O’Brien, the writer O’Brien stresses on the significance of telling one’s story to cope with disturbing memories of war. The character O’Brien starts the chapter “Spin” with bits of stories of his fellow soldiers that are disconnected to the continuing war. O’Brien describes how his fellow soldiers entertain themselves in the more subtle moments of their time in Vietnam like two of his friends digging a foxhole every night so that they ca play checkers. Here he now reveals that he is now a writer and is at the age of forty three. He claims that writing stories of the past has made the bad memories reappear. Although his daughter Kathleen encourages him to write happier stories; he maintains that writing about what he remembers is a way of coping with things that you can’t stop thinking about. For the character O’Brien, there is a need to tell his stories so that the past can be brought to the future and in that, bring understanding for people who are strangers to that experience. In the next chapter, “On the Rainy River”, the character O’Brien recollects his dilemma of going to war. As an outstanding graduate from Malacaster College, he has always been against war and especially to a war that he did not understand. When he was being drafted into military service right after graduating from college, he was confronted with the pressure from society and going against his own principles. Amongst his ponderings on his predicament, he considered running off to Canada to escape his drafting enlistment. In his confusion, he later runs off, landing along Rainy River, the river that separates Minnesota from Canada. There he meets Elroy Berdahl, the owner of the fishing resort that he stayed for six days. In this time that they spend together, the character of Elroy Berdahl helps O’Brien to come up with the decision unknowingly and that is to adhere with his draft notice. On this chapter, readers are made to realize of the character O’Brien’s need to give good reason for his decision to go to war even if it was against his principles. He describes the difficulty of making a decision on such a young and gullible age to defend his decisions. Moreover, this part of the story is another example of the author’s fusion of fact and fiction because he himself was faced with the decision to obey or forgo his draft notice as a fresh college graduate. O’Brien also stresses on the first chapter, “The Things They Carried”, that instead of eagerness to do duty for country, the more overpowering reason why soldiers like him go to war was fear of being shamed or “fear of blushing”. Of experiences in the wartime, the character O’Brien says that it is not possible to neither believe nor tell a true war story. In the chapter, “How to Tell a True War Story”, the author focuses on the nature of storytelling in the confusing times of war. O’Brien says that elements that are real in a true war story are almost always connected with unbearable things while the ordinary elements are not real. For this he says that “It’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”(O’Brien, 1990, pp. 82). War brings confusion on perceptions because perceptions are always contradicting. An account of an incident cannot be generalized because people involved in the incident have their own story on how things might have happened. For O’Brien, true war stories are those stories that reveal something unthinkable of the people in it because war in a sense is evil and never good. War stories that leave readers with a good feeling are therefore false. O’Brien writes that he, like his fellow soldiers, is burdened with guilt; guilt from incidents from the war and guilt of being alive. In particular, the death of a fellow soldier named Kiowa. O’Brien presents four different stories from four soldiers including him who witnessed Kiowa’s death throughout the book. Norman Bowker, a fellow former soldier, requests that O’Brien write on his behalf his story of Kiowa’s death through a letter. Bowker has indeed not moved on from the guilt that burdened him even after the war was over and wanted to release his troubles. O’Brien does write a story and entitles it “Speaking of Courage” but omits Kiowa’s death and Bowker’s true identity in the story because he himself found it difficult to deal with the event. In receiving Bowker’s letter, he realized what writing stories about the war has done for him and thought that he would have ended like Bowker, swamped in guilt and bad memories because he was unable to communicate his thoughts. Bowker takes his own life some time after O’Brien releases his story as part of another book. After a long period of time, O’Brien restructures the story “Speaking of Courage” and characterizes Norman Bowker as himself as part of the book “The Things They Carried”. This signifies O’Brien’s turning point in dealing with Kiowa’s death and Bowker’s anguish. By writing fully what Bowker would have wanted him to write, he overcomes his own troubles. When one reads this compilation of stories, the confusion between fact and fiction is a sure thing. The author gives much importance in the validity of his facts and that is evident in the way he uses the essence of truth through his stories. O’Brien writes that “You start sometimes with an event that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur, but that, nonetheless help to clarify and explain.” (O’Brien, 1990, pp. 158). O’Brien implies that ‘happening truth’ is just another representation of what exactly happened but the ‘story truth’ is an account of what the writer or the one telling the story experienced. ‘Story truth’ becomes more substantial because it has the potential to let the readers feel the emotions encompassing an experience through creative writing. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” (O’Brien, 1990, pp. 179). One such truth is that death became a normal event for soldiers in the Vietnam War. In the chapter “The Lives of the Dead”, O’Brien brings back memories of his first encounter with death; not of the war but of his earlier years as a young boy. He summons up memories of his first love, Linda, a girl from his school who he fell in love with. When Linda dies of brain tumor, O’Brien describes how he became upset because it seemed unreal that he was seeing Linda now as a dead corpse. He says that later he became engrossed in sleeping to dream and make fantasies where Linda is still with him, talking to him and giving him comfort. In Vietnam, when O’Brien faces horrific deaths, he writes that he brings back memories of Linda to comfort him. In the war, soldiers dealt with their companion’s death by recounting stories and thus making them less dead. It is therefore in stories and fiction that the dead stays alive. As a grown man and a writer, O’Brien writes of his fellow soldiers as a way of dealing with their deaths by remembering how they were when they were alive. And for Linda, still his source of great comfort, he writes that “As a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body—her life.” (O’Brien, 1990, pp. 236). Writing and telling stories of the past was O’Brien’s way of achieving solace with his personal anguish of the war and of the infecting pains of his fellow soldiers. Although writing causes a lot of painful memories to resurface, for him it was the only way to deal with it. “I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.” (O’Brien, 1990, pp. 246). Reference O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Read More