Review of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

This book was recommended to me sometime in high school seven years ago. I finally had the chance to read The Things They Carried about two weeks ago. A bit late for today's standards (for a writer), but at least I got it done. I was afraid to become disappointed in a book that was so highly acclaimed by everyone I had come across. It's safe to say that this was not the case. In such a short period of time between finishing the novel and thinking about what I would write in my review, The Things They Carried has become one of my favorite story collections. I say collection because O'Brien did not write this novel in a conventional, chronological way as it was done primarily in Realism, a style much like the style O'Brien chose to write this collection.

Each chapter in The Things They Carried can be read on its own or compacted together to form what it has become after publication. A lot of negative reviews are based upon this absurd idea that this novel is about Vietnam, disregarding the love stories that are in the text, and I am not referring solely on First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’ love for Martha. I am referring to the whole shebang. Despite being in a war zone, these men have become the objects that they carried—objects used as survival souvenirs. Essentially, they become these objects—objects that we use in our daily lives. The men almost become superstitious and become infatuate with materials they think will bring them safely home.

The most captivating story for me can be found in the chapter titled “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” a clear chapter that demonstrates this book is not about Vietnam, but about the experiences of people who didn’t have a voice before joining something of this magnitude. Mary Anne Bell, for which this chapter is dedicated to, is a heart wrenching character—a young, seventeen year-old blonde from the suburbs who is flown in from the boonies in Cleveland to Vietnam to visit her high school sweetheart Mark Fossie. Within several days Mary Anne Bell demanded to be around the “thatched roofs and naked children, the wonderful simplicity of village life” (96).  Within a few weeks Mary Anne realized she was in a war after practicing being in ambush on several occasions. And one day, she never returned. “And then one morning, all alone, Mary Anne walked off into the mountains and did not come back.” Mark Fossie’s perfect woman did not get swept away by Nam, what happened to her is that she discovered her true self. Mary Anne felt as though she was part of a community, a person doing actual good whether it was being a part of the Vietnamese people or not, at least she was not going to follow the classic outline of a woman’s predestined life; get married, have children, take care of the kitchen, the husband, and throw away the self along with a predestined plan not of her own. Mary Anne fell in love with nature, to the possibility of living out a life free of restrictions. The story is overwhelmingly melancholic because of the time span a human being can lose his or her innocence, in this case, the lost innocence of a young woman who lived for years in a comfy suburban area, not knowing what the meaning of war was, to only be pushed into it so easily and see it alive in front of her—this all foreshadows the narrator’s lost innocence. He chose to re-tell this story because in a way, the narrator feels as though he’s still lost out there, deep in the jungle, just like Mary Anne.

If the narrator really wanted to talk about the war in Vietnam, I doubt he would be re-telling or even observing the small things that happened to these men. When it comes to a work of fiction, usually, politics and war is only a framework to hold the core of the story in place. The real meat lies in characterization. And Tim O’Brien has awed me. How can I not fall in love with a man who always wears panty hose around his neck while in combat? Or Jimmy Cross’ lonely idea of love, or the narrator’s constant repetitive sentences to portray trauma. Or the fact that despite being stories about love in a war zone, the narrator is trying to teach you how to write a good story while he pushes through his memories (meta-fiction).

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) T.S. Eliot writes, “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.”
What this means is that we should forget about the author, and look solely at the text in front of us (also called New Criticism). I don’t care if Tim O’Brien says this story is about him or if reviewers constantly throw that at my face. I care about what’s written down. As a fiction writer, reader, reviewer, I’m looking at this as fiction because that’s what is states in the back cover. Therefore when I was reading this collection, the narrator, named Tim O’Brien was not the author Tim O’Brien whose picture lies on the back cover. Critiquing the work exclusively on its craft and not on blue-book knowledge, will give us the opportunity to break apart each word and savor the way it is beautifully glued together into sentences and paragraphs to create stories and characters we will never forget. Every time I get stuck in my own work from now on, I will refer to this magnificent collection of stories.