"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to." Tim O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried" is also part of a novel by the same title. (See reviews below.)
In the Amazon.com Review of the novel, the section "On the Rainy River," is the focus of the review; however, these ideas can applied to "The Things They Carried":
"A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, [in] The Things They Carried [. . . ] Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato [O'Brien's earlier collection] played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth.
The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true.
In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make.
The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so.
Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable." --Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
"Weapons and good-luck charms carried by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam here represent survival, lost innocence and the war's interminable legacy. 'O'Brien's meditations--on war and memory, on darkness and light--suffuse the entire work with a kind of poetic form, making for a highly original, fully realized novel,' said PW. 60,000 first printing."
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Questions to consider after reading:
- What is the setting--place, time period, and event--of the story?
- How can we find a contemporary parallel to this story's setting?
- Even if not at war, can the characters' struggles also parallel everyday struggles people face? How?
- Create a character sketch of Lieutenant Cross--what type of person is he? How does he react to situations?
- O'Brien writes, "The things they carried were largely determined by necessity." As the story develops what are the different ways necessity could be defined or determined by each character?
- What happened to Lavender? How is this a turning point or maybe the climax of the story?
- Who is Martha? How can she be both a character and a symbol?
- What is significant about Jimmy Cross's name? What might it represent (symbolize) within the context of the story?
- How do the "things they carry" become abstract (or metaphorical) for the characters?
- What symbolic action does Lieutenant Cross do with one group of objects he carries? What do the objects represent? How does Cross's action change what these objects represent for Cross and the reader?
- What are possible themes we can draw from this story?
- How is the question of what is truth explored in this story?
A Vietnam Vet "blogs" about reading this collection and his experiences:
http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/category/longer-works/obriens-the-things-they-carried/
Back ground on the Vietnam War--
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html
The setting for the story:
http://www.traveljournals.net/explore/vietnam/map/m4958358/than_khe.html
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