Module 15: The Things They Carried

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Summary: Tim O'Brien captures what life was like for a group of men out in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. The story goes in and out of present day for the narrator. He is reminded of certain things that happen, how he felt at the time, and the events that would trigger his memory for happier times. The men each have a specific item that reminds them of home and comfort. Whether it was a Bible or photographs, each man was able to recall a better time than the one they woke up to every morning. Through the experience, the men form a bond to each other that will last a life time for some. Filled with violence, bloodshed, heartache, and fear, the novel journeys down the winding road of the suffocating jungle of Vietnam as these men try to finish their mission and find their way back to a place to get them home. 

APA: O'Brien, T. (1990). The Things They Carried. New York, NY: Houghton.

Review: "'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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title."

Citation: N.A. (1990). "The Things They Carried" Booklist. Retrieved from http://www.booklistonline.com/The-Things-They-Carried-Tim-OBrien/pid=1614719.

Library Use: During Banned Book Week, this book brings in a lot of interest for young men. Quite a few of them are considering joining the military, and where there have been many medical and technological advancements since this book was written, there is still a lot of things that happen in the novel that can explain to young men and women what war does to people. This is a real life setting with, although O'Brien will not fully admit, real life situations. The pictures he paints are real and gruesome. This book can show students a reality of war, and by using it in a library as a center, they can recreate one of the vivid memories on paper or create a plot/timeline for the story.