Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried presents an essentially contradictory narrative premise. Moreover, O’Brien presents himself as the protagonist, narrator, and author of the collection while declaring these roles mutually exclusive. Such oppositions force the reader to employ a synthetic and self-referential analysis to comprehend the internally oppositional narrative. In doing so, one finds that O’Brien’s systematic blurring of definitions accentuates his experiential perspective, rather than the knowable fact of his stories, in turn rejecting the rationalization of experience.
O’Brien begins his task by subverting the dichotomy separating the material and the spiritual, replacing it with a contrast between those objects necessary for …show more content…
His claim that “stories can save us” (O’Brien 213) finds its first iteration in his first encounter with a dead body during the war. He finds the experience “way too real” (O’Brien 214), overwhelming him while the rest of his company easily produces a post-mortem narrative with the body. Perhaps more significantly, he saturates his account of Linda with notions of salvation, even to the extent that the film he remembers seeing with her told the story of “a man whose death and figurative resurrection saved the world from Nazi Germany” (Vernon 174). He first develops the motif externally, as he wants to use his authorial power to retroactively “save Linda’s life” (O’Brien 223), but gradually elaborates to the point where the salvation includes some form of himself, as he becomes “Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (O’Brien 233). Ultimately, his insistence on the ability of his inconsistent narrative to bring salvation conveys his personal necessity for the empirical comprehension of his artwork. To receive his story as fact rather than pathos destroys any meaning present in the
O’Brien begins his task by subverting the dichotomy separating the material and the spiritual, replacing it with a contrast between those objects necessary for …show more content…
His claim that “stories can save us” (O’Brien 213) finds its first iteration in his first encounter with a dead body during the war. He finds the experience “way too real” (O’Brien 214), overwhelming him while the rest of his company easily produces a post-mortem narrative with the body. Perhaps more significantly, he saturates his account of Linda with notions of salvation, even to the extent that the film he remembers seeing with her told the story of “a man whose death and figurative resurrection saved the world from Nazi Germany” (Vernon 174). He first develops the motif externally, as he wants to use his authorial power to retroactively “save Linda’s life” (O’Brien 223), but gradually elaborates to the point where the salvation includes some form of himself, as he becomes “Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (O’Brien 233). Ultimately, his insistence on the ability of his inconsistent narrative to bring salvation conveys his personal necessity for the empirical comprehension of his artwork. To receive his story as fact rather than pathos destroys any meaning present in the