The Soldier In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

“The duty of every soldier is to protect the innocent, and sometimes that means preserving the lie of good and evil- that war isn’t just natural selection played out on a grand scale,” (Will Staples). This passage describes a relativist idea not compatible with many modern belief systems, one that many fear would dissolve society down to a animalistic remnant of what it once was. Those people do not realize though, that taking a short jaunt outside of western civilization into a warring land results in their submersion in such a reality- kill or be killed. This reality is one that Tim O’Brien had to deal with in Vietnam, just as all soldiers there did. However, O’Brien was not truly a soldier; this was not his war. Likewise, it's not his duty

On many occasions, the author acknowledges his work as fictional and engages the reader in doing so. Opening the vignette “Good Form” with the statement, “It’s time to be blunt,” (O’Brien 171) immediately engages the readers. The quote is not followed by another sentence that directs the first to any one of the numerous characters from the twenty some vignettes, so the reader can be certain that he or she is the one being spoken to. O’Brien does this so that he may gain a personal level with the reader. The vignette is no longer a story or a paragraph; instead, it has become a conversation between the author and the reader. O’Brien explains to the reader, “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening truth,” (O’Brien 171). He is making it clear that to him, the story does not need to be real for it to feel real; as a matter of fact, sometimes stories that are not real feel more real than those that are. Despite this, the reader does not cease to wonder what is true, what is the reality of events. It is nearly impossible not to wonder; after all, O’Brien constantly adds incredibly confusing antithesis to his vignettes. Perhaps the most contradictory of these paradoxes is found when the vignette “Good From” ends with, “‘Daddy, tell the truth,’ Kathleen can say, ‘did you ever kill anybody?’ And I can

Perhaps the most real of all of the characters in the novel is Tim O’Brien himself. As a matter of fact, his character is so real that the reader often forgets that a separation between the character O’Brien and the real O’Brien. The character O’Brien states multiple times throughout the novel, “I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while,” (O’Brien 31). This is not merely a statement present in a work of fiction, but, instead, it is a metafictional sentence directed towards the reader. Just as the reader cannot tell if anything in the story is real, they cannot tell if they are being addressed by the real or fictional O’Brien. This becomes even more difficult when the reader sees all the way that both lives are connected: “Both the real and fictional Tim O’Brien are… writers who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Macalester College, served as grunts in Vietnam after having been drafted at age twenty-one, attended graduate school at Harvard University, and wrote books entitled If I die in a Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato,” (Calloway 250). The stark similarities are no doubt in place so that O’Brien may humanize his fictional self; how can his character not seem real, if it is so strongly rooted in facts the reader knows to be true? With such a vague