Summary Of Tim O 'Brien's The Things They Carried'

Tim O’Brien states in The Things They Carried that “Stories are for joining the past to the future” (36). Early in this novel, O’Brien adds “I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening” (31). In this quote O’Brien foreshadows some of the approaching short stories. But the recurring struggle that O’Brien goes through when reliving these awful memories causes him to describe the details in a way you will feel what he has felt. Making the past with the present and the truth blurred with the fiction. His purpose, is to write about his struggle to write these war stories, including his obsession to continue to write them. O’Brien uses himself to illustrate the emotional and physical weight of his obsession to write war stories about Vietnam. In the introduction of this novel, O’Brien opens with a list of the physical objects like a catalog of what each soldier carries. This reveals

This statement was last said in the ending chapter “The lives of the Dead.” O’Brien last sentences of this novel states “I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.” O’Brien has experienced many horrific events but he wants the past to never be forgotten. He wants to tell the readers why he wrote the book the way he did, and why “story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (171). He states, “I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief,” after writing the war stories “I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again” (172). O’Brien doesn’t believe that his work is therapy even after the statement above, but it 's the reliving of the past that is allowing him to accept what has