Exploring the Truth through the Things They Carried - Literature review Example

Exploring the Truth through The Things They Carried Through his short story, “The Things They Carried,” author Tim O’Brien postulates the idea that there is significant difference between the truth as historical fact and the truth as it is experienced and known by those who have lived it. The story’s focus is not on the historical accuracy of the events during Vietnam War. On the other hand, the author makes the characters participate in a drama where his readers are able to gain a sense of what his characters are feeling as they experience, the subjective truth. This becomes manifested in the dialogue, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth.” (203). O’Brien doesn’t rely on the facts of the episode to narrate a true war story where the ‘happening truth’, remains clouded and unclear even to the soldiers themselves. Instead, he has chosen to portray the emotions and experiences of the soldiers themselves. The ‘story truth’ can only be discovered through fictionalized accounts that represent the truth of the war to all soldiers who fought it regardless of their movements. This story further demonstrates that the objective truth can only be found in the emotions of the individuals. “For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel – the spiritual texture – of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true … You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity” (O’Brien cited in Riley, 2006: 124). O’Brien’s story, ‘The Things They Carried’, reveals a sense of paradoxical caring yet not caring, attached yet detached search for meaning in a world where meaning has ceased to exist. It further provides the reader a deeper understanding of the truths of war through the characters in a way that has nothing to do with the facts of the war as they might be reported. In this story, the readers will notice O’Brien’s deftness in juxtaposing the facts of war with the truths of war by the manner in which he consistently switches back and forth between relying on factual details like listing the standard equipment each soldier is required to carry as a part of his ‘pack’, and those things the soldiers carry by virtue of their existence as a human being. The author provides an accurate account of the official gear required to be on hand for each man and each unit, often down to the approximate weight one might expect to ‘hump’ with such equipment: “What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty … As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, 26 pounds with its battery. As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds” (4-5). These can be perceived as the reported facts or the ‘happening truth’ of the story. On the other hand, there are ‘story truths’ that provide the author with means of relaying the real truths of war to his readers because he has the opportunity to include heavier weights that these men carry as they undertake various missions. This is the subjective truth of the war as opposed to facts as it is experienced by the participant. Jimmy Cross, the lieutenant, has his own personalized list of required equipment he must carry, including “the responsibility for the lives of his men” (5), while Kiowa “carried his grandmother’s distrust of the white man” (4). The story illustrates each man’s particular emotional burden that he has to carry, which becomes specifically highlighted when O’Brien again combines fact and the storyteller’s fiction in the case of Ted Lavender, who “went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak-jacket and helmet and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear” (6). The author employs fiction as the means to demonstrate the weight of fear felt by Ted Lavender in this scene. However, the fact that he is ‘making this up’ as a part of his literary technique does not diminish the truth of the emotion that the readers can discern, which is shared by thousands of soldiers who feel the same way as they go through the turmoil of the war they wage. Thus, by making the readers recognize such emotions, the author underlines that emotions cannot be discerned merely through historical factors but can be perceived only when it is laced with an element of fiction. In contrast to many works where we notice romanticizing of war that might be conveyed through a glorious recitals of battles won, O’Brien conveys how each character carries the evidence of his own loss of meaning as a part of his kit. In doing so, the author becomes capable of thrusting a realization upon the reader that there is no romance or glory involved in wars. Further, he manages to prove that the sense of purpose that provides a driving force for most people is actually absent in these men’s lives. “The Things They Carried” portrays the soldiers no better than beasts of burden by giving an emphasis on the long lists of things they carry specifically mentioning the approximate weight of the pack, which slowly increases as the story progresses. “Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together, these items weighted between 15 and 20 pounds,” (2-3). The factual accounts of this list delineate the individuality of the men by means of the differences in the weight they carry. O’Brien further illustrates the difficulty the soldiers face in maintaining their sense of identity by drawing the readers’ attention towards the personal items these men carry with them. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross keeps Martha’s letter in his person, which provide indicate how one might try to cling to a memory of himself as a means of reminding him of who he ‘really’ is. While everyone knows that these letters in no way represents love letters, the soldier has nevertheless attached romantic ideals to the image of this girl he knew back home. This, for him, is his only means of remembering himself as an individual human being. “He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire” (2) and “thought of new things he should have done” (5) as if his role as a soldier has deprived him of any chance of doing similar things in his life. Again, the author discounts war as a stage for idealism and romantic heroism, and renders it and emotional edge by portraying Lavenders’s death. “It was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something – just boom, then down – not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle – not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down. Nothing else” (6-7). There is no purpose, there is no heroism, there is almost no humanity – Lavender was on his way back from the bathroom and falls as if he were little more than a bag of dirt or a loose rock. The narrator tells us that Cross feels the pain, further removing Lavender’s humanity from him as if he were incapable of any feelings either before or after the shot. Yet, the narrator can’t help but continue to refer back to Lavender’s death throughout the story, recognizing that there should be importance in the individual but not recognizing why to assign the same. Again no volume of facts or figures can explain this concept; whereas, on the other hand, a fictionalized presentation of the true emotions discovered in the characters can accomplish this feat. Approaching his story from a fictionalized account, O’Brien has been able to present with any degree of validity, the emotions and impressions that the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War went through. Factual cases were not capable of delivering the necessary emotional content to the readers adequately to give them a deeper understanding of the truth of the war as the soldiers experienced it. Through fiction, however, he has been able to draw on the entire group of soldiers, illustrating various ways that each of them attempted to reorient themselves to the being they were forced to become in a world that no longer made any sense. The persistent realities of factual necessity, represented by the statistics of the weight of equipment each man was required to carry for his own survival and the accomplishment of his duties, O’Brien has become able to demonstrate how the individual was squeezed out of his own skull. War changed him into something that would do whatever it took to survive and accomplish the task that he’d been ordered to finish regardless of how he felt about the action as a human being. However, the anonymous ‘he’ that represents all soldiers in war, cannot escape his own humanity. He still clings to those things that represent what was good or clear about him in the past, when he had a sense of who and what he was, also represented by the things he carried in the form of memorabilia or survival tools. The agent of change emerges as the intangible elements of the things the soldiers carried, in the form of guilt, shame, repression, fear or responsibility as they are manifested by the individual personality. Through fiction, O’Brien has been able to present the truth of war from a uniquely human perspective. Works Cited O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” Riley, Brett Alan. “The Separatism of Vietnam Veterans: Reality vs. Representation, Narrative vs. Memory, History vs. Myth, and the Return to ‘The World’.” Separation Anxieties: Representations of Separatist Communities in Late Twentieth Century Fiction and Film. Louisiana: Louisiana State University, 2006: 124-178. Read More