the things they carried essay introduction

  • My Preferences
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  • The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien

  • Literature Notes
  • Book Summary
  • About The Things They Carried
  • Character List
  • Summary and Analysis
  • On the Rainy River
  • Enemies and Friends
  • How to Tell a True War Story
  • The Dentist
  • Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong
  • The Man I Killed and Ambush
  • Speaking of Courage
  • In the Field
  • The Ghost Soldiers
  • The Lives of the Dead
  • Character Analysis
  • Tim O'Brien
  • Lt. Jimmy Cross
  • Norman Bowker
  • Mary Anne Bell
  • Henry Dobbins
  • Tim O'Brien Biography
  • Critical Essays
  • The Things They Carried in a Historical Context
  • Narrative Structure in The Things They Carried
  • Style and Storytelling in The Things They Carried
  • The Things They Carried and Loss of Innocence
  • The Things They Carried and Questions of Genre
  • Full Glossary for The Things They Carried
  • Essay Questions
  • Practice Projects
  • Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis The Things They Carried

An unnamed narrator describes in third person the thoughts and actions of Jimmy Cross, the lieutenant of an Army unit on active combat duty in the Vietnam War. Lt. Cross is preoccupied by thoughts of Martha, a young woman he dated before he joined the Army. He thinks about letters she wrote him; he thinks about whether or not she is a virgin; he thinks about how much he loves her and wants her to love him. Her letters do not indicate that she feels the same way.

The narrator lists things that the soldiers carry with them, both tangible and intangible, such as Lt. Cross's picture of and feelings for Martha. Other members of the unit are introduced through descriptions of the things they carry, such as Henry Dobbins who carries extra food, Ted Lavender who carries tranquilizer pills, and Kiowa who carries a hunting hatchet. O'Brien introduces readers to the novel's primary characters by describing the articles that the soldiers carry. The level of detail O'Brien offers about the characters is expanded upon and illuminated in the chapters that follow, though O'Brien distills the essence of each characters' personality through the symbolic items each carries. Henry Dobbins carries a machine gun and his girlfriend's pantyhose. Dave Jensen carries soap, dental floss, foot powder, and vitamins. Mitchell Sanders carries condoms, brass knuckles, and the unit's radio. Norman Bowker carries a diary. Kiowa carries a volume of the New Testament and moccasins. Rat Kiley carries his medical kit, brandy, comic books, and M&M's candy. The narrator offers additional detail about selected items; for example, the poncho Ted Lavender carries will later be used by his fellow soldiers to carry his dead body.

This device is an example of the author and narrator embedding small details in the text that will be further explained later in the book. It is important to note, too, how the details are selective; they are recalled by a character, the unnamed narrator of the chapter. The details of what each man carries are funneled through the memory of this narrator.

O'Brien details at great length what all the men carry: standard gear, weapons, tear gas, explosives, ammunitions, entrenching tools, starlight scopes, grenades, flak jackets, boots, rations, and the Army newsletter. They also carry their grief, terror, love, and longing, with poise and dignity. O'Brien's extended catalog of items creates a picture in the reader's mind that grows incrementally. O'Brien's technique also allows each character to be introduced with a history and a unique place within the group of men.

Lt. Cross is singled out from the group, and O'Brien offers the most detail about his interior feelings and thoughts. Many of these soldiers "hump," or carry, photographs, and Lieutenant Cross has an action shot of Martha playing volleyball. He also carries memories of their date and regrets that he did not try to satisfy his desire to become intimate with her by tying her up and touching her knee. O'Brien stresses that Lt. Cross carries all these things, but in addition carries the lives of his men.

Even as O'Brien opens The Things They Carried, he sets forth the novel's primary themes of memory and imagination and the opportunity for mental escape that these powers offer. For example, as Lt. Cross moves through the rigorous daily motions of combat duty, his mind dwells on Martha. Importantly, as he thinks about Martha, he does not merely recall memories of her; instead he imagines what might be, such as "romantic camping trips" into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. O'Brien describes these longings of Lt. Cross as "pretending." Pretending is a form of storytelling, that is, telling stories to oneself. O'Brien underscores the importance of Lt. Cross's actions by emphasizing the artifacts — Martha's letters and photograph — and characterizes Lt. Cross as the carrier of these possessions as well as of his love for Martha.

O'Brien moves from employing the literary technique of describing the soldiers' physical artifacts to introducing the novel's primary characters. The minute details he provides about objects that individuals carry is telling, and particular attention should be paid to these details because they foreshadow the core narratives that comprise the novel. This technique of cataloging the things the soldiers carry also functions to create fuller composites of the characters, and by extension make the characters seem more real to readers.

This aesthetic of helping readers connect with his characters is O'Brien's primary objective in the novel, to make readers feel the story he presents as much as is physically and emotionally possible, as if it were real. Though the minutiae that O'Brien includes — for example the weight of a weapon, the weight of a radio, the weight of a grenade in ounces — seems superfluous, it is supposed to be accretive in his readers' imaginations so that they can begin to feel the physical weight of the burdens of war, as well as, eventually, the psychological and emotional burdens (so much as it is possible for a non-witness to war to perceive). O'Brien's attention to sensory detail also supports this primary objective of evoking a real response in the reader.

With Lavender's death, O'Brien creates a tension between the "actuality" of Lt. Cross's participation in battle and his interior, imagined fantasies that give him refuge. In burning Martha's letters and accepting blame for Lavender's death, Cross's conflicting trains of thought signal the reader to be cautious when deciding what is truth or fantasy and when assigning meaning to these stories. While he destroyed the physical accoutrements, the mementos of Martha, Lt. Cross continues to carry the memory of her with him. To that memory is also added the burden of grief and guilt. Despite this emotional burden, O'Brien, as he continues in the following chapter, begins to highlight the central question of the novel: Why people carry the things they do?

rucksack A kind of knapsack strapped over the shoulders.

foxhole A hole dug in the ground as a temporary protection for one or two soldiers against enemy gunfire or tanks.

perimeter A boundary strip where defenses are set up.

heat tabs Fuel pellets used for heating C rations.

C rations A canned ration used in the field in World War II.

R & R Rest and recuperation, leave.

Than Khe (also Khe Sahn) A major battle in the Tet Offensive, the siege lasted well over a month in the beginning of 1968. Khe Sahn was thought of as an important strategic location for both the Americans and the North Vietnamese. American forces were forced to withdraw from Khe Sahn.

SOP Abbreviation for standard operating procedure.

RTO Radio telephone operator who carried a lightweight infantry field radio.

grunt A U.S. infantryman.

hump To travel on foot, especially when carrying and transporting necessary supplies for field combat.

platoon A military unit composed of two or more squads or sections, normally under the command of a lieutenant: it is a subdivision of a company, troop, and so on.

medic A medical noncommissioned officer who gives first aid in combat; aidman; corpsman.

M-60 American-made machine gun.

PFC Abbreviation for Private First Class.

Spec 4 Specialist Rank, having no command function; soldier who carries out orders.

M-16 The standard American rifle used in Vietnam after 1966.

flak jacket A vestlike, bulletproof jacket worn by soldiers.

KIA Abbreviation for killed in action, to be killed in the line of duty.

chopper A helicopter.

dustoff Medical evacuation by helicopter.

Claymore antipersonnel mine An antipersonnel mine that scatters shrapnel in a particular, often fan-shaped, area when it explodes.

Starlight scope A night-vision telescope that enables a user to see in the dark.

tunnel complexes The use of tunnels by the Viet Cong as hiding places, caches for food and weapons, headquarter complexes and protection against air strikes and artillery fire was a characteristic of the Vietnam war.

The Stars and Stripes A newsletter-style publication produced for servicemen by the U.S. Army.

Bronze Star A U.S. military decoration awarded for heroic or meritorious achievement or service in combat not involving aerial flight.

Purple Heart A U.S. military decoration awarded to members of the armed forces wounded or killed in action by or against an enemy: established in 1782 and re-established in 1932.

entrenching tool A shovel-like tool, among its other uses, used to dig temporary fortifications such as foxholes.

zapped Killed.

freedom bird Any aircraft which returned servicemen to the U.S.

sin loi From Vietnamese, literally meaning excuse me, though servicemen came to understand the term as meaning too bad or tough luck.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Analysis of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 26, 2021

In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O’Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), among others. Comprising 22 pieces—some little more than vignettes, others more “traditional” stories—the collection details the experiences of the soldier Tim O’Brien, who returns to his native Minnesota after a tour of duty in Vietnam. In his subsequent role as author, O’Brien records his recollections in a false memoir of sorts as a way of reconstructing the war’s elusive “truth.” O’Brien’s goal in The Things They Carried, he tells Michael Coffey, “was to write something utterly convincing but without any rules as to what’s real and what’s made up. I forced myself to try to invent a new form. I had never invented form before” (60).

“In the Field” follows Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his platoon of 17 remaining men as they search a Vietnamese muck field for Kiowa, a lost comrade. Cross, who figures prominently in several of the book’s pieces—including the eponymous “The Things They Carried,” the collection’s most anthologized story—feels tremendous guilt over Kiowa’s death, not the least because the previous evening, just before an ambush, Cross refused to disobey orders and to move his men to higher, and therefore safer, ground. Kiowa, buried when a fellow soldier inadvertently gave away the platoon’s position to the enemy, was a popular soldier. Out of respect for their fallen comrade, the men dutifully wade through waist-deep sewage searching for his remains; they sustain themselves with a morbid sense of humor, making light of the situation in order to quell their fear of random, sudden death at the hands of a faceless enemy. Cross quickly realizes that he is ill suited for the military, having been shipped to Vietnam after joining the officer training corps in college only to be with friends and to collect a few college credits. “[Cross] did not care one way or the other about the war,” O’Brien intones, “and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field” (168).

the things they carried essay introduction

Tim O’Brien/The Austin Chronicle

War is a great leveler in O’Brien’s fiction. In the field where Cross and his men search for Kiowa, “The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command” (163). The young lieutenant, however, suspends his humanity only with great difficulty. Ruminating on Kiowa’s death, he imagines writing a letter to the soldier’s father before deciding that “no apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway” (176). Cross’s rationalization may absolve him (at least in part) of his guilt over Kiowa’s death, though it is also a tacit admission of his lack of control over the war’s daily life-and-death struggles. Cross’s desire to organize the details of Kiowa’s death in his own mind is an extension of O’Brien’s attempt in The Things They Carried to construct a coherent narrative that finds the essential truth of war (a notion that the author confirms in the ironically titled “How to Tell a True War Story” which acts as an interpretive key to his recollections).

Upon the discovery of Kiowa’s body, the men properly mourn the loss of their fellow soldier, though “they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance” (175). Cross, yearning for war’s end, imagines himself on a golf course in his New Jersey hometown, free of the burden of leading men to their deaths. O’Brien examines the onus of responsibility often, and in the related story “Field Trip,” which details the author’s return to Vietnam two decades later to the field where Kiowa died, O’Brien finds a world barely recognizable as the one he left behind. “The field remains, but in a form much different from what O’Brien remembers, smaller now, and full of light,” Patrick A. Smith writes of O’Brien’s visit. “The air is soundless, the ghosts are missing, and the farmers who now tend the field go back to work after stealing a curious glance in his direction. The war is absent, except in O’Brien’s memory” (107). But it is memory, O’Brien makes clear, that supersedes experience and haunts soldiers long after the shooting has stopped.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Coffey, Michael. “Tim O’Brien: Inventing a New Form Helps the Author Talk about War, Memory, and Storytelling.” Publishers Weekly, 16 February 1990, pp. 60–61. O’Brien, Tim. “In the Field.” In The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Smith, Patrick A. Tim O’Brien: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2005.

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The Things They Carried

By tim o'brien.

  • The Things They Carried Summary

The Things They Carried is a collection of twenty-two stories, or chapters. All focus on the Alpha Company and the fate of its soldiers after they return home to America. A character named Tim O’Brien (same name as the author) narrates most of the stories.

In “The Things They Carried,” the Alpha Company is mobilized to fight in the Vietnam War. The soldiers carry goods necessary to their survival as well personal items. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries letters and photos from a female friend named Martha , and spends most of his time mooning over her. The first casualty for the company is Ted Lavender , shot dead while relieving himself. Cross blames himself for the death because he thinks he was too busy thinking about Martha to properly take care of his troops. He burns her letters and photographs and decides to be a better leader.

In “Love,” Jimmy goes to visit the narrator, Tim O’Brien, in his home in Massachusetts after the war. Cross relates that he bumped into Martha after she got home, and that he still loves her although she doesn’t love him back. He has never forgiven himself for Lavender’s death, but pleads with O’Brien to portray him as a great leader if the writer ever writes about their experiences.

“Spin” is made up of a collection of recollections of the ordinary things soldiers do when they are at war, such as playing chess games. O’Brien compares the war to a Ping-Pong ball, saying that one can spin it in many different directions. He is now a 43-year-old writer who only writes war stories. His daughter thinks he should find a happier topic, but O’Brien keeps replaying the gruesome war scenes over and over in his mind.

In “On The Rainy River,” O’Brien describes the decision of whether or not to go to war after receiving his draft card. He had just graduated college and planned to go to Harvard for graduate school. He was split between the instinct to run, and the instinct to do what everyone expected: go to war. He took the car up to the Canadian border, and a friendly hotel owner rowed him along a river right up to Canada. In the end he couldn’t bring himself to jump out of the boat. He cried in the boat, paid Elroy for the room, and drove home. It is a hard story for O’Brien to tell, he writes, because it shows that he was a coward and that he made the wrong choice.

In “Enemies,” two members of the company, Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen , get into a fistfight over a missing penknife. Jensen wins the fight and breaks Strunk’s nose. Jensen borrows a pistol and uses it to break his own nose. Then he asks Strunk if they are “square.” Strunk says yes and laughs at his new friend -- because he was the one who had stolen Jensen’s knife in the first place. In “Friends,” Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk make a pact that if either were seriously injured or crippled, the other would find a way to kill him. In October Lee Strunk steps on a mortar and loses his leg as a result of the accident. He is terrified, because he thinks Jensen will kill him. Later the men find out that Strunk has died, which seems to relieve Jensen of a big burden.

In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Curt Lemon steps on a mortar and is killed. O’Brien has to go up into a tree to pick out his remains, and one of the other men makes a bad pun on “lemon tree,” similar to many other morbid jokes the soldiers make throughout the book After Lemon's death, Rat Kiley writes his sister a long letter to which she never responds. Rat dismisses her as a “dumb cooze.” O’Brien says this is a true story because such stories are unsentimental, seem too crazy to believe, or else never end. Another “true” story O’Brien tells is about a water buffalo the company tortured after Lemon died. It seems incomprehensible, so it must be true, he writes.

After Curt Lemon was killed, and O’Brien describes having a hard time mourning him in “The Dentist.” Lemon was a macho guy, but one day a dentist came in on a helicopter to check up on the men’s teeth. Lemon was so afraid that when it was his turn he passed out in the dentist’s chair. Then he was so ashamed that he woke up the dentist in the middle of the night, insisted that he had a toothache, and made the dentist remove a perfectly good tooth.

O’Brien retells a story that he first heard from Rat Kiley in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” Before joining up with Alpha, Kiley was stationed at a medical detachment near the village of Tra Bong along with a special force called the Green Berets. A young man named Mark Fossie imported in his American girlfriend. Fossie got upset when she didn't return to their quarters one night. It turns out she wasn’t cheating on him, but was on ambush duty with the Green Berets. Later, Fossie finds her in the Green Beret encampment wearing a necklace made of human tongues. In the end, she becomes a killer and disappears into the mountains by herself.

Henry Dobbins keeps his girlfriends’ stockings wrapped around his neck for good luck, and credits them with the fact that he never gets shot. Then, in “Stockings,” his girlfriend says she wants to break up. He continues to wear the stockings around his neck all the same. In “Church,” the company sets up camp at a pagoda where a few monks still remain. The monks especially like Henry Dobbins, who talks about possibly joining the order and gives the monks some chocolate and peaches as a parting gift.

In “The Man I Killed,” Tim O’Brien surveys the man he killed, repeating the same details over and over: He has thin, arched eyebrows, like a woman; he is thin, with a concave chest, like a scholar. O’Brien imagines that the man was always afraid to go to war, was possibly in love, was possibly a scholar. Kiowa tries to get O’Brien to stop staring at the corpse, with no success.

In “Ambush” O’Brien’s nine-year-old daughter, Kathleen , asks her father if he has ever killed anyone. Of course not, O’Brien tells her; he thinks when she is a grown-up she will understand better. In “Style,” his company enters a burnt-down compound full of dead bodies, and the only living person they find is a young girl, dancing. Azar thinks she is performing some strange rite. Dobbins thinks she is dancing because she likes to dance.

In “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker returns to his hometown after the war is over. His best friend is dead and his ex-girlfriend has married someone else, so he has no one to talk to about why he failed to get a Silver Star medal for courage. He imagines a conversation with his father about the subject; the reason he didn’t get the medal was that he let his comrade Kiowa die in a shit field after Kiowa was shot. Bowker stops for a burger, drives around his hometown lake, and stops to admire the sunset. In 1975, writes O’Brien in “Notes,” he received a letter from Bowker telling the story that he retells in “Speaking of Courage.” O’Brien wants to emphasize that he made up the part about Bowker failing to save Kiowa and worrying about why he didn’t get the Silver Star. The letter shook O’Brien, who had congratulated himself on adjusting so well, transitioning straight from Vietnam to Harvard. In 1978, Bowker hanged himself.

All 18 soldiers in the company search for Kiowa’s body in the shit field in “In the Field.” Bowker eventually locates Kiowa’s body. Cross mentally rehearses different letters he might write to Kiowa’s father; perhaps he will take responsibility for the death, perhaps not. Instead of writing the letter to Kiowa’s father, he decides, he’ll play golf. In “Good Form,” O’Brien, the 43-year-old writer/narrator, says that “story truth”, i.e. what happens in the story, is more important than “happening truth,” i.e. what happened in reality. A few months after writing “In the Field,” O’Brien returns to Vietnam with his daughter, Kathleen, who is ten. In “Field Trip,” she doesn’t understand what the war was about, nor why her father insists on traveling to a funny-smelling place (the shit field). O’Brien buries a pair of Kiowa’s moccasins where his friend died, and tries to say goodbye.

O’Brien blames Bobby Jorgenson , a young medic who replaced Rat Kiley with the company, for almost letting him die of shock after getting shot. In “The Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien enlists Azar’s help to get revenge on Jorgenson. They make noises outside Jorgenson’s encampment to make him think he is being attacked. Jorgenson is terrified, but then he figures out it's just O’Brien, and the two say they are “even.” “Night Life” is the account, culled secondhand from another soldier, of how Rat Kiley went beserk and had to leave the company. The strain of the war was too much for him and he shot himself in the foot to be discharged from the army.

In “The Lives of the Dead” O’Brien writes that the purpose of stories is to save lives. He had been in love with a nine-year-old, Linda , when he was also nine. They went on a date, and then she died of a brain tumor. Afterwards, he made dates with her in his dreams, and they went ice-skating together. The purpose of stories, writes O’Brien, is to make people like Linda or the soldiers killed in Vietnam live again.

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The Things They Carried Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Things They Carried is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

is this a war story, per se? if so who is the main character, and why?

This particular story is more about sexual longing than war. Mark Fossie seems to be the main character who wants to import his girlfriend.

What is it that Jimmy cross carries with him? What do they represent?

Jimmy always carries letters from Martha. His identity and hopes for the future are part of those letters.

How does Tim kill his first enemy

I think with a grenade.

Study Guide for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried study guide contains a biography of Tim O'Brien, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

  • About The Things They Carried
  • Character List

Essays for The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien.

  • Rationalizing the Fear Within
  • Physical and Psychological Burdens
  • Role of Kathleen and Linda in The Things They Carried
  • Let’s Communicate: It’s Not About War
  • Turning Over a New Leaf: Facing the Pressures of Society

Lesson Plan for The Things They Carried

  • About the Author
  • Study Objectives
  • Common Core Standards
  • Introduction to The Things They Carried
  • Relationship to Other Books
  • Bringing in Technology
  • Notes to the Teacher
  • Related Links
  • The Things They Carried Bibliography

the things they carried essay introduction

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The Things They Carried : Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War Novel Endures

Privates First Class Carl Baden (New Orleans, Louisiana) and Arcadio Carrion (Puerto Rico) laying in the mud waiting for artillery to knock out the machine gun bunker that has them pinned down in a tree line at My Tho (April 4, 1968).

Privates First Class Carl Baden (New Orleans, Louisiana) and Arcadio Carrion (Puerto Rico) laying in the mud waiting for artillery to knock out the machine gun bunker that has them pinned down in a tree line at My Tho (April 4, 1968).

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Fifty years ago, many young men like Tim O’Brien , author The Things They Carried —published in 1990—were drafted into the army and later served in what was increasingly becoming an unpopular war. Today, in times of a volunteer army, many aspects of the military have changed. For one thing, women now serve in combat roles, too.

Critics have hailed The Things They Carried as one of the finest examples in American literature of writing about war. O’Brien served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, and, in The Things They Carried , wrote a collection of linked stories that reads like a memoir. A character introduced in one story will appear in a later one, and even though they’re all linked in some way, each story can stand on its own. The title story is an overture and creates the world of Vietnam for readers. The story also establishes the physical weight of objects each soldier carries by choice or by regulation. Later in the novel, however, the things they carry are psychological. In the opening story, the repetition of the phrase “the things they carried” becomes haunting, and it unifies the experience for the reader, who begins to feel the weight of objects the soldiers carried.

Each character in the novel’s opening story carries, along with those articles that were SOP (standing operating procedure), personal items that often serve as a talisman or a salve for the grueling psychological effects of battle. Additionally, O’Brien writes, “they carried ghosts.”

In World War II, the average age of an American soldier was the mid-twenties, while that of soldiers in Vietnam was nineteen. The young soldiers in Vietnam were especially susceptible to the psychological pressures of combat.

Drafted in the summer of 1968, O’Brien himself is a character in the novel, acting primarily as narrator but also, significantly, as the principal character in one story. In “ On the Rainy River ,” O’Brien sets off to his home state’s northern border with Canada. There, along the Rainy River’s southern banks in Minnesota, O’Brien contemplates fleeing the draft and slipping into Canada. In an interview , O’Brien has talked about the story and its relation to actual facts. An author “plays with facts,” he says, in order to get to the truth.

O’Brien himself never spent days along the Canadian border, contemplating and seriously considering life as a draft dodger. Instead, he played golf that summer in southern Minnesota, but the anxiety of having to report to his induction base a few weeks later produced a tightness in his chest similar to that felt by the fictional O’Brien, who finally decides not to dodge the draft. “On the Rainy River” raises philosophical questions for students concerning the true meaning of courage.

Students who have read novels set in times of war, such as, among others, The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (published in 1948) can make useful comparisons and contrasts with The Things They Carried . Mailer’s groundbreaking WW II novel, as does The Things They Carried , presents the reader with a cross section of soldiers serving in war. Readers and critics often note that both Mailer and O’Brien have written with journalistic detail. A comparison of the two authors’ use of the same techniques can help students talk about the various ways novelists can present the experience of war.

In interviews, OBrien speaks of a “stomach feeling” he wants to leave with his readers. He doesn’t sanitize details. Students who may have read Johnny Got His Gun (published in 1939) can discuss the “stomach feeling” they may have had from reading the novel by Dalton Trumbo.

When O’Brien was writing The Things They Carried in the late 1980s, American women were not serving in combat roles, although, as Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s   documentary The Vietnam War demonstrates, in the war without a front, many women did serve in Vietnam as nurses near combat and at medical bases. Since 2015 women in the military can serve in combat zones.

The story “Sweatheart of the Song Tra Bong” was, O’Brien says, a “heuristic exercise.” By a kind of storyteller’s trial and error, he decided to try to craft a story that interjects a woman (the girlfriend of the medic, Rat Kiley) into the combat experience, first as the traditional girl next door in a pink sweater, who is improbably visiting Kiley in Vietnam, to a night-stalking member of a Green Beret unit. She goes native, echoing, admits O’Brien, The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Students can consider to what extent O’Brien’s story does or does not still ring true, now that women serve in combat, too, and are also beginning to write about their war experiences, as female veterans discussed  recently in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in a writing  workshop reported on in the Washington Post .

O’Brien’s success in creating for readers an authentic experience of war stems from a variety of techniques and styles, including linked stories, milieu-setting detail, and a cross section of well-drawn characters. The novel can serve either as an introduction to war lit generally or as a useful tool to further build on the writings on war students may have already encountered.

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Introduction & Overview of The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried Summary & Study Guide Description

First published in Esquire in August, 1986, and later collected in The Best American Short Stories 1987, "The Things They Carried" became the lead story in a book of the same name published in 1990 by Viking Penguin. Since Tim O'Brien had already established himself as a literary voice to be reckoned with, this collection of interrelated stories received a great deal of attention. The book quickly established O'Brien as one of the leading figures in Vietnam literature.

Critics and readers alike have paid considerable attention to the question of whether the events in the book are literally true or products of O'Brien's imagination. Though O'Brien has made it clear in interviews that he believes the truth in literature has nothing to do with what actually happened, the similarities between his writing and his experience in Vietnam are striking. When O'Brien published the disturbing and confessional article "The Vietnam in Me" in the New York Times Magazine in 1994, he sparked renewed interest in the connections between his life and his writing. His last two novels are set in the United States but still prominently feature the Vietnam veteran's experience.

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The Things They Carried

Tim o’brien, everything you need for every book you read..

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Mortality and Death

The threat, even expectation, of death hangs over all of the soldiers in The Things They Carried . Even before he reaches Vietnam, Tim O'Brien (both the author of the collection and the frequent first person narrator) meditates on the inevitability of his death after he is drafted in "On The Rainy River," and considers dodging the draft and fleeing to Canada. The collection is haunted by the deaths of O'Brien's comrades—Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon


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Social Obligation

In The Things They Carried , O'Brien often focuses on how the men in his stories, even if they volunteered to fight, joined the army because of the unspoken pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and soldiers. These social obligations range from that of wider society (government, city/town) and narrows to the nuclear (family, friends, personal reflection). After being drafted in "On the Rainy River," Tim O'Brien runs from his hometown and ends up


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Within the stories in The Things They Carried the characters tell many stories to each other, and the question always asked of the storyteller is "What's the moral?" In "How to Tell a True War Story," Mitchell Sanders tells O'Brien about a company who has to lie dormant and watchful in the pitch-blackness over a village. They begin to have auditory hallucinations: champagne glasses clinking, music playing, a full chamber orchestra. They aren't supposed to


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Storytelling and Memory

Storytelling in The Things They Carried operates on multiple levels: at the level of the book itself, the stories within stories, and the reflections on the value of these stories both in the context of the war and then post-war. "The Lives of the Dead" speaks to O'Brien's belief that stories have the power to give an entire life to those who have passed on. He refers to his childhood love Linda who passed away


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Shame and Guilt

Shame and guilt are constant and often inextricable themes in The Things They Carried . Soldiers felt obligated to go to war for fear of embarrassing themselves, their families, and their towns if they fled. This embarrassment is bolstered by the guilt of not being "masculine" enough—not being brave, heroic, and patriotic enough. O'Brien reflects on how he thought he had a secret reserve of bravery and heroism stored away, waiting for the moment when


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Analysis of Storytelling in The Things They Carried by Tim O'brien

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Introduction, meanings of fear and dehumanization in "the things they carried".

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the things they carried essay introduction

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The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried  is a powerful look into the lives and experiences of foot soldiers during and after the Vietnam war. Written by Tim O’Brien, the work is concurrently an autobiographical account of the war, a memoir, and a collection of short, fictional stories.

O’Brien chose to subtitle the book, “A Work of Fiction”, and successfully and intentionally blurs the lines of reality and fantasy by dedicating his work to individuals who will later be revealed as being the novel’s fictional characters.

To further complicate the overlapping of genres, and the continual shifts between fact and fiction, the protagonist in The Things They Carried  is a veteran of the Vietnam war by the name of “Tim O’Brien.” With the creation of this fictional persona, O’Brien is effectively able to explore his true emotions as if they were fictitious and challenges readers to reconsider stories that they perceive to be false, as they could just as easily be true .

The novel is particularly compelling in part to its originality and the manner in which O’Brien uses the art of storytelling to call upon his own memories of the Vietnam war and the catharsis of the past. Several of the characters in the book seek out resolution.

When reading this study guide, note the designations used to distinguish between Tim O’Brien the author and the fictional character in the novel, “Tim O’Brien”. Despite the similarities that the two share, it is important to remember that the work is a novel and not the autobiography of the author. The novel is, rather, presented as the autobiography of the fictional “Tim O’Brien.”

The medium becomes a part of the message of the novel: the undependable main character “Tim O’Brien” continues to challenge the truth of the stories he tells and the things he hears and passes on, which, in turn, causes the audience to question the truth in the stories that O’Brien shares with them.

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Emotional Burden in O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction, the things they carried, works cited.

The Things They Carried is a fictional chef-d’oeuvre by Tim O’Brien, which catalogs among other things, the different things that soldiers carried to the Vietnam War. These soldiers carried emotional and physical burdens viz. guilt, fear, love, pocketknives, M-16 rifles among other things. O’Brien explores the theme of emotional burdens artistically and at some point, comically. Obrien notes, “They carried the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories
cowardice…they carried the soldier’s fear (20). Even though the things they carried were meant to help them fight the enemy, in the end, the intangible things (emotional burdens) turned out to fight the soldiers, killing them from within.

The emotional burdens as explored by O’Brien came in different forms and each soldier had a special burden that underscored his woes. The emotional burden of guilt surfaces immediately after the story starts. Jimmy Cross, a lieutenant enlisted to take care of the other soldiers is the victim of the guilt burden. Jimmy witnessed as a bullet broke open Lavender’s skull, an incident that plunged him into emotional turmoil. Given the fact that he was the one in charge of the other soldiers’ well-being, he felt he could have done something to prevent Lavender’s death. Unfortunately, he could do nothing at that point; Lavender was dead and gone for good. Jimmy became emotionally troubled because instead of concentrating on the security and well-being of fellow soldiers he could only think of Martha. Consequently, Lavender died due to his lack of concentration or so he thought. A person charged with the responsibility of taking care of his fellow soldiers should be focused to achieve his objective. Unfortunately, Jimmy could not live up to this duty and when Lavender died before his eyes, he realized how careless he had been in executing his duties. All these feelings culminated into guilt feelings, an emotional burden that he had to bear so long as the war continued. What a terrible emotional baggage for one to carry! To cover his guilt, Jimmy embarked on a journey to become the best lieutenant. However, for this to happen, he had to sacrifice some emotions like love for Martha, his college crush. The issue of Jimmy’s love for Martha ushers in the next emotional burden viz. love.

Cross sincerely loved Martha and no matter how hard he tried to subdue these feelings, they resurfaced with time. This emotional burden weighed so heavily on him that at times he lost focus on the war. O’Brien observes, “He loved her so much
though painful, he wondered who had been with her that afternoon” (8). Time and space stood between Jimmy and the love of her life. If only he could roll time back, he would spend some quality time by her side. Unfortunately, these were only fantasies and as the adage asserts, fantasy never mimics reality. The death of Lavender unveiled this truth to Jimmy and he had to shed this emotional baggage at whatever cost. Though painful, Jimmy decided to forget Martha completely, and focus on the war. As a way of tearing down this emotional baggage, he resolved to burn all love letters, photographs, and anything else that reminded him of Martha. Forgetting a lover is not an easy task, it takes more than a willing heart, it takes absolute resolve and this comes with its emotional upheavals. Emotionally, Cross was a torn person, full of sorrows and heavy laden with emotional burdens. To release his feelings, he could only cry throughout the night under the cover of the darkness. Just like any other person, soldiers have emotions; they crave for love, acceptance, and warmth. Regrettably, war robs them of these elemental things in a human’s life. O’Brien deliberately explores Jimmy’s case to show the emotional burdens that the soldiers brought along together with the things they carried (Kaplan 63). Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is not alone in this predicament, as aforementioned, every soldier had his fair share of emotional baggage, as shown by the few soldiers O’Brien chose to use in The Things They Carried.

Family ties are usually very strong and separating someone from his/her family amounts to emotional torture; something that the soldiers had to live with. For instance, Kiowa, “
carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father
” (O’Brien 3). Nothing could remind Kiowa of his dad like that treasured bible; every time he saw the bible, he would remember his beloved father. Apart from this, Kiowa carried the memories of his grandfather by preserving that ‘old hunting tomahawk.’ Even though physically burdened by things like the M-16 rifle, these treasured assortments carried memories of Kiowa’s family, memories of his almost lost family, something that burdened him emotionally. Henry Dobbins on his part carried a pair of pantyhose and he would poke his noses into the paper containing the panties from time to time. Not that Henry Dobbins loved his girlfriend’s panties; no, he missed her and this burdened him emotionally. Regrettably, the closest he would come to his girlfriend was through feeling the smell of her panties, a pathetic way to find warmth and love. Apart from emotions of love and loneliness, fear was part of these soldiers.

On the battlefield, anyone could die and this inevitable fact burdened the soldiers emotionally. Just like Lavender and others who died in the course of the war, anybody else would die at any time and this uncertainty amounted to emotional torture. O’Brien posits, “Imagination was a killer” (10), to emphasize the burden of fear that these soldiers carried around. The imagination of being the next victim to die emotionally burdened these soldiers. To cope with these torturing emotions, they had to dehumanize every human trait in them. Unfortunately, psychologically they became changed forever. O’Brien concludes, “you start clean and you get dirty and then afterward it is never the same” (114). Even to date, the majority of the surviving soldiers have exhibited some psychological disorders at one point in their lives. The psychological rip off that these soldiers underwent narrows down to emotional baggage; baggage, which they knew not, the day of its relief.

In conclusion, the soldiers that went to the Vietnam War carried burdens that were more than the physical burdens; they carried emotional burdens of memories of their families coupled with the fear of not knowing when death would strike. For sure, the intangible things that they carried had real weight, to some extent, heavier than the physical burdens. Jimmy Cross carried the guilt of letting Lavender die while engrossed in thoughts of his ever-elusive lover, Martha. Kiowa carried the emotional burden of his father and grandfather and the possibility of not seeing them once again weighed heavily on him. Collectively, these soldiers experienced different forms of emotional torture, which boiled down to emotional burdens as O’Brien explores in his fictional masterpiece, The Things They Carried.

Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim O’Brien . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Print.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.

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  1. The Things They Carried: Introduction

    The Things They Carried: Introduction "The Things They Carried" is a powerful and influential novel written by Tim O'Brien, first published in 1990. Set during the Vietnam War, the book explores the experiences of a group of American soldiers deployed to the front lines and delves into the psychological and emotional burdens they carry with them.

  2. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien Essay

    "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien Essay Exclusively available on IvyPanda Updated: Oct 28th, 2023 Table of Contents Introduction The main theme of "The Things They Carried" by O'Brien is the events that were happening during the Vietnam War. The war does not revolve around things such as heroism or tactics.

  3. The Things They Carried Essay Examples and Literary Analysis

    Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a collection of essays, all centered on anecdotes of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The seemingly straightforward recollections slowly reveal dense layers of personal and metaphorical meanings upon closer inspection, with the exploration of the characters' emotions...

  4. The Things They Carried: Summary & Analysis

    Summary An unnamed narrator describes in third person the thoughts and actions of Jimmy Cross, the lieutenant of an Army unit on active combat duty in the Vietnam War. Lt. Cross is preoccupied by thoughts of Martha, a young woman he dated before he joined the Army.

  5. The Things They Carried Study Guide

    Summary Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides. The Things They Carried: Introduction A concise biography of Tim O'Brien plus historical and literary context for The Things They Carried.

  6. The Things They Carried: Mini Essays

    Elroy Berdahl Literary Devices Themes Motifs Symbols Protagonist Antagonist Setting Genre Allusions Style Point of View Tone Foreshadowing Metaphors & Similes Questions & Answers How does Kiowa die? What are the things the soldiers carry? In the title story of the book, why does Lt. Cross burn Martha's letters?

  7. The Things They Carried: Study Guide

    Published in 1990, The Things They Carried is a collection of linked short stories written by Tim O'Brien that provides a powerful portrayal of the experiences of American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The narrative is structured around the physical and emotional burdens carried by the soldiers, both tangible and intangible.

  8. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien Essay

    Introduction "The Things They Carried" is a collection of stories by Tim O'Brien. Each short story reveals the experience of a military unit fighting in the Vietnam War and presents a combination of historical events and the author's fiction.

  9. Analysis of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

    In the short story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), Tim O'Brien cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful chroniclers of the Vietnam War, joining the conversation alongside Philip Caputo ( A Rumor of War ), Michael Herr ( Dispatches ), David Halberstam ( The Best and the Brightest ), and the poet Bruce Weigl ( Song of Napalm ), am...

  10. The Things They Carried

    A summary of "The Things They Carried" in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of The Things They Carried and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.

  11. The Things They Carried Study Guide

    Infographics Biography of author Outline The Things They Carried: Introduction Immerse yourself in the complex world of war and its enduring influence as you study the introduction to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. The Things They Carried: Plot Summary

  12. The Things They Carried Summary

    The Things They Carried is a collection of twenty-two stories, or chapters. All focus on the Alpha Company and the fate of its soldiers after they return home to America. A character named Tim O'Brien (same name as the author) narrates most of the stories. In "The Things They Carried," the Alpha Company is mobilized to fight in the Vietnam War.

  13. The Things They Carried: Tim O'Brien's Vietnam War Novel Endures

    Critics have hailed The Things They Carried as one of the finest examples in American literature of writing about war. O'Brien served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, and, in The Things They Carried, wrote a co-created collection of linked stories that reads like a memoir. Used in high school literature and history classrooms across the U.S., our essay offers analysis of this popular book.

  14. O'Brien's "The Things They Carried": Literary Analysis

    The essay analyzes "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien. This collection of short stories is devoted to a platoon of American soldiers who fight in the Vietnam War. The book is a powerful blend of fact and fiction that leaves the reader with a lasting impression of fear, love, and gratitude for the novel's components.

  15. The Things They Carried

    This detailed literature summary also contains Bibliography and a Free Quiz on The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. First published in Esquire in August, 1986, and later collected in The Best American Short Stories 1987, "The Things They Carried" became the lead story in a book of the same name published in 1990 by Viking Penguin.

  16. The Things They Carried Themes

    In The Things They Carried, O'Brien often focuses on how the men in his stories, even if they volunteered to fight, joined the army because of the unspoken pressure to fulfill their obligations as citizens and soldiers. These social obligations range from that of wider society (government, city/town) and narrows to the nuclear (family, friends, personal reflection).

  17. The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

    The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien (Full name William Timothy O'Brien) American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and journalist. The following entry presents criticism on O'Brien's short ...

  18. "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien: A War Memoir Essay

    Each man is required to carry grenades; the grenades could be smoke grenades, white phosphoric grenades or tear gas grenades. Tim O'Brien explains that "they carried all they could bear, and then some; including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried" (O'Brien, 2009). The things they carry also vary with the kind ...

  19. Interpretive Essay

    Interpretive Essay: The Things They Carried Keith D. Oliver Southern New Hampshire University. O'Brien's story "The Things They Carried" describes the burdens that soldiers carried during the Vietnam War. Even though the majority of people never experience the feeling of fighting in a war, it still affects them.

  20. Analysis of Storytelling in the Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

    Introduction. In the novel The Things They Carried, author Tim O'Brien consistently stretches the truth in a way that portrays feeling or emotions that would not be clear otherwise. O'Brien uses a form of untrue storytelling about factual events to try to convey certain feelings and emotions that may have been harder for the audience to ...

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    📜 The Things They Carried Essay: How to Write Pick up your topic. Carefully read the book and make highlight places that you think you can put into consideration in your paper. Brainstorm some ideas you can use. Alternatively, take a look at our The Things They Carried essay examples to get inspiration. Draft your thesis statement.

  22. The Things They Carried Essay, The Things They Carried

    The Things They Carried. The Things They Carried is a powerful look into the lives and experiences of foot soldiers during and after the Vietnam war. Written by Tim O'Brien, the work is concurrently an autobiographical account of the war, a memoir, and a collection of short, fictional stories. O'Brien chose to subtitle the book, "A Work ...

  23. Emotional Burden in O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" Essay (Critical

    Introduction. The Things They Carried is a fictional chef-d'oeuvre by Tim O'Brien, which catalogs among other things, the different things that soldiers carried to the Vietnam War. These soldiers carried emotional and physical burdens viz. guilt, fear, love, pocketknives, M-16 rifles among other things. O'Brien explores the theme of ...