Things They Carried By Tim O Brien: An Analysis

Tim O'Brien’s Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award winning 1990 novel, The Things They Carried, takes place during the unsettling Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although O’Brien had received his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in 1968, his brilliance would never have been able to prepare him for what was to come. In the June of 1968 Tim O’Brien was drafted for military service, only a mere two weeks after completing his degree. During the course of his college career, O'Brien had grown an immense opposition against war, causing him to have frequent thoughts of escaping to Canada. With the pressures of his community and sense of patriotism, O’Brien eventually submitted the call to the draft on August 14, 1968 and was sent to acquire basic Army training at Fort Lewis, Washington. …show more content…
While he recognizes that the author’s minute details partially “strengthens our impression that the narrator is striving,” it is evident that Kaplan believes that they should not be the main focus of the novel. Steven Kaplan states that by destroying the line that separates fact from fiction, “fiction (or the imagined world) can often be truer.” Kaplan argues that the facts of an event are given but are quickly followed by an inquisition. From this uncertainty, a new set of facts come forth, which are then again brought back to questioning. Steven Kaplan concludes that storytelling in this book is something of which everything is rearranged in an attempt to get the “full truths” about events that “deny the possibility of arriving at something called the… fixed