The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

I’m a minimalist so I tend to like things neat and clean. But sometimes the written word gets dirty and here I hope to explore the places in literature where things get complicated, messy and murky. Sometimes authors do this on purpose and other times authors create their own disasters.

I want to start by looking at a big gooey mess where the mess is completely intentional: Tim O’Brien’s short story collection, The Things They Carried. It’s fiction, but O’Brien messes with genre all over this book. First he dedicates the book “to the men of Alpha Company and in particular Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.” The reader assumes this dedication is from the author not the narrator, but as the narrator breathes life into the names with all that these soldiers carried, I found myself flipping back to that dedication page and wondering, is this real? Is it true? The lives of soldiers expand and contract before us and each story further illuminates the truth of the war experience.

He uses the devices of a nonfiction writer by revealing the narrator’s struggle crafting a story that isn’t his own. The narrator visits with his platoon leader after the war. They talk about love and war and what happened to the girl in the photograph that Jimmy Cross used to carry with him. At the end of the visit Cross says, “Make me out to be a good guy, okay. Brave, and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever. […] And do me a favor. Don’t mention about–.” The narrator says, “I won’t,” but the reader reads it all. We know the narrator has written about all of it. If this were true nonfiction, we might not be able to forgive our narrator. But it’s fiction and we can forgive our narrator for betraying a fictional character.

The narrator also reminds us that this is fiction because “in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true” and it’s the idea of truth that makes this collection such a wonderful big, gooey, mess like ice cream on a hot day that you eat too fast and end up scraping off the edges. Or, more true to this collection, it’s the light shining through trees after your buddy just stepped on a booby-trap.  “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty.”

O’Brien writes about masterfully about true lies and false truths. He blurs the edges of genre and the whole time maintains complete control. The Things They Carried: a favorite big, gooey mess.

Noriko Nakada lives with her man and dog in Los Angeles, California.  She teaches at Emerson Middle School and will continue to do so even after Oprah decides to plug her book, Through Eyes Like Mine.  She completed her mfa at Antioch University Los Angeles in 2005 and continues to write, blog, tweet and facebook about life, literature, food, education and sports. She blogs at www.norikonakada.com.