Talisman

Literary Modes in War Literature

The immediate impact of The Things They Carried is based on O'Brien's fidelity to detail. The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds. These facts are combined with the intangible and the psychological. They all carried ghosts, they shared the weight of memory and they carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die or already have passed away. O'Brien uses his detail and sense of war to bring meaning to his war story. I felt that the use of Tragedy, Myth and Gothic were well constructed literary modes in the novel "The Things They Carried". These men in the story carry heavy physical loads, they also all carry heavy emotional loads, composed of grief, terror, love, and longing. Each man's physical burden underscores his emotional burden. After the war, the psychological burdens the men carry during the war continue to define them. Those who survive carry guilt, grief, and confusion, and many of the stories in the collection are about these survivors' attempts to come to terms with their experience.

Repeatedly in The Things They Carried O'Brien forces this image before us to convey the tragedy of war. It also serves as a metaphor for combat to American soldiers in Vietnam "the shit" referred to "the day-to-day combat operations endured by GIs in the field" (Clark 463). O'Brien relays this conventional metaphor by making it horribly expandable. That men's lives were wasted in Vietnam is likewise made literal by the shit field. Kiowa's death also evokes the notion that for the U.S. Vietnam was nothing more then a trip without meaning or resolve. This field," O'Brien writes, "had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam" (210).

What is striking about The Things They Carried, though, is not this particular image but that O'Brien narrator's elaborate use of self-consciousness. We are given several versions of this incident. In "Speaking of Courage" O'Brien tells us that Norman Bowker failed to save Kiowa. In "Notes" he reveals that Kiowa's death had been omitted from an earlier version of the story and that Bowker, haunted by that night, had committed suicide. In "In the Field" O'Brien blames not Bowker but an unnamed soldier who instigated the mortar attack by turning on his flashlight. And in "Field Trip" O'Brien tells how, years after the war, he returned to the site of Kiowa's death and waded into the Song Tra Bong -- not to purify himself but to plunge into the same filth in which Kiowa drowned. "That little field," he writes,

Nowhere in The Things They Carried does O'Brien explain more clearly the psychic devastation brought by wartime tragedy. To overcome this tragedy and to regain what he lost in Kiowa's death, O'Brien must confront his past. Where as he had once "felt a certain smugness about how easily he had made the shift from war to peace" (179), now he acknowledges the psychological damage caused by the war, writing, "in a way I'd gone under with Kiowa, and after two decades I'd finally worked my way out. I felt something go shut in my heart while something else swung open" (212). O'Brien seems at last to confront the horrible truth of his experience in that field.

At the end of the novel O'Brien's final story, "The Lives of the Dead," focuses on a broader sense, concentrating not on Vietnam but on those times throughout O'Brien's life when he was made aware of human mortality -- from the death of childhood schoolmate Linda to numerous American and Vietnamese battle casualties. These confrontations with mortality scar him and shape his belief that the most important thing fiction can do is to look back at the dead. "Stories," O'Brien suggests, "can save us in a story the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world" (255). Stories are a means of overcoming trauma, "a way of bringing body and soul back together" (267).

Even as we are influenced by ancient myths such as The Iliad, where war is extolled and the valorous warrior praised, modern novels such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried challenge those very notions. Like The Iliad, This novel is about war. It is about battles and soldiers, victory and survival, yet the message O'Brien gives us runs almost contradictory to the traditional war story. Where as traditional stories of war take place on corporeal battlefields where soldier battles soldier and the mettle of man is tested, O'Brien's battle occurs in the shadowy, private place of a soldier's mind. Like the Vietnam War itself, these different stories get Americans to question the foundations of their beliefs and values because it calls attention to the inner conscience.

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