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. Unfortunately, the battles of Vietnam left O’Brien and his fellow comrades to face the realities of war. Such convoluted burdens cause the characters to become strained with both internal and external conflicts. The Things They Carried simultaneously combines Tim O’Brien’s memoirs, a biography about war, and short anecdotes of his comrades. To further this complication, O’Brien destroys the fine line between reality and fiction. The fictional aspect of the novel challenges the validity novel, as the readers are forced to interpret stories that can be easily be seen as true. Because there a slight distinction between Tim O’Brien, the writer, and “Tim O’Brien,” the fictional main character, the novel can be seen as the autobiography of the fictional character rather than a simple life story of the author himself. The author’s originality of the author’s structure causes the novel to become compelling since it shifts the primary focus to how the story it told. Through the complexity of O’Brien’s innovative form, the author’s true emotions become unveiled as he struggles to cope with the realities of war and grasp a resolution of some sort. In Steven Kaplan’s literary criticism written in the fall of 1993, “The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,'” Kaplan claims that the factuality and certainty of the novel’s information “will not amount to much.” What Kaplan believes, essentially, is that Tim O’Brien’s usage of “certainties” are there to simply conceal uncertainties. …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 truth.” Steven Kaplan proposes a viable assertion since O’Brien’s The Things They Carried does in fact appear to be true. In the chapter titled “Ambush,” O’Brien describes the say he killed a man outside of My