The Theme Of Redemption In The Lives Of The Dead?

"But this too is true," Tim O 'Brien 's narrator insists in the first line of the chapter that concludes The Things They Carried: "Stories can save us" (224). Entitled "The Lives of the Dead," this final chapter thus begins with a promise not only of healing, but of redemption as well. Stories, the narrator suggests, can heal the traumatized veteran of the Vietnam War and provoke an amnesiac nation into "working through" its troubled past. If, as John Hellemann has written, "the legacy of Vietnam is the disruption of our story, of our explanation of the past and vision of the future" (x), then O 'Brien 's narrator apparently points "the disrupted story" and the nation toward a narrative cure. Such a reading of The Things They Carried, however,

Like "The Lives of the Dead," it begins with a statement that the rest of the chapter throws into question. "The War wasn 't all terror and violence," the narrator tells us, "Sometimes things could almost get sweet" (31). What follows, however, is a series of vignettes that are anything but "sweet." When a Vietnamese boy with a plastic leg approaches an American soldier with a chocolate bar, the soldier reflects, "One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo" (31). When the same soldier steals his friend 's puppy, "strapped it to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device," he responds with an ironic affirmation of the initiation right of the conventional war story: "What 's everyone so upset about? ... I mean, Christ, I 'm just a boy" (37). Here, the novel renders ironic both the loss of innocence and the "reconsideration" that structure the traditional war story. The positive spin that underlies the war story as a genre emerges here only as a bankrupt fantasy. Thus in "How to Tell a True War Story," the narrator warns, "If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie" (68). Aimed

For in place of tales of moral uplift and the persistence of human goodness, tales structured to provide the catharsis of Aristotelian tragedy, "Spin" offers the ambiguous, the unfinished, and the wound that will not succumb to the narrative cure. Keeping the wound open, O 'Brien 's text prevents the neat closure and false redemption of the traditional war