O Brien's The Things They Carried: Chapter Analysis

The Things They Carried doesn’t follow the classical narrative that is used in most novels. The reader is introduced to the characters and what they carry in the very beginning, but after that, the novel doesn’t follow the normal plot structure found in many stories. Throughout the book, O’Brien orders the stories, not chronologically, but in a way that creates a switch between conflict and peace, creating no actual resolution in the end. The last chapter doesn’t provide much closure, instead showing that O’Brien’s wants to do much more than just telling a war story. The incorporation of Linda, both dead and alive, shows how stories helped him throughout Vietnam and after. This chapter shows how celebrates the dead by remembering the living, …show more content…
Instead, O’Brien uses The Lives of The Dead to show how his war story has much more meaning than describing what it is like to be involved in a war. It shows that “stories can save us...and even still, right here, I keep dreaming Linda alive” (225). Linda represents the loss of O’Brien’s innocence, as he experiences love and death almost simultaneously. Even though this novel is supposedly a war story, Linda’s death, many years before the war even started, holds much more weight than any of the soldiers’ deaths in Vietnam. O’Brien shows that you can’t call these war stories, instead it shows how caring gives the power to remember the dead. Even though he is 43 years old and a writer now, he is “still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way” as when he was younger (245). This story, just like all the others in the book, keep him alive, and because of this, the last chapter doesn’t end the story, but continues it. The memories O’Brien shares with the reader, especially with a significant death in the last chapter, makes his stories about war, love, and