Resurrecting Power Of Stories Literary Analysis

The Resurrecting Power of Stories The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a fictional story that exhibits love, loss, war, coming-of-age, innocence, and so much more. O’Brien explores all of these themes through an even bigger topic: storytelling. He also inversely picks apart the various aspects of storytelling via the smaller themes. One of the products of this analysis that I find to be most intriguing is the resurrecting power of stories. O’Brien asserts that stories have the capability of bringing life back to the dead, and are a form of immortality. Revolving around a war, it is no surprise that The Things They Carried contains death multiple times in almost every chapter. However, most of the fatalities are not random casualties of war; they are people that the narrator keeps returning to. The first example is Ted Lavender. Lavender’s death is first mentioned on the second page, but O’Brien and the other soldiers continue …show more content…
O’Brien says that since her death, he has frequently imagined that Linda was alive again. Even though the girl is dead, O’Brien assures that he will never forget her, and she is still living out his memories in his mind. As a portrayal of this belief, his memory representation of Linda told him, “Once you’re alive, you can’t ever be dead (231).” By O’Brien’s remembrance of her, she is brought back to life in his mind.
He may not remember exactly how Linda looked when she was nine, or recall everything they did together, but he can imagine and add on to his story indefinitely just as Rat Kiley did. O’Brien fully knows that Linda is dead but declares “…in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen.” He can imagine her skating with him, holding his hand, or anything he