Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

“But what is an author?”- a question posed by philosophers, literary critics, English teachers, and the general public since the author-figure became widely used. A hot topic of debate is never easy to find a simple answer for, and the query of authorship is no different. Luckily, hot topics of debate also happen to have many harmonious and clashing opinions surrounding them, free for an individual to agree or to disagree with. This is but one: to be an author is to be a conduit for ideas; a conduit’s significance to a work depends on the content of the work and the readers’ intentions with it- a juxtaposition with narrative technique, which should never be analyzed in regard to the author. It’s true that the concept of the author is

Contrary to popular belief, authors are people, which make them multifaceted and difficult to predict. Owing to this, reasons for using distinct styles vary from author to author. An experience may have been shared by two authors, but that is no indicator that they’ll write in the same way as a result of that same incident. In fact two authors may even write in an identical technique as a result of two entirely different experiences. In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes to transform his experiences with Vietnam and with human nature into a book that is widely recognized as fiction- and the situations seem illusory, but feel so real: “[a]fterward, when you go to tell about [the past], there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed” (71). Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five is routinely compared with The Things They Carried, as the two works share the commonality of wartime commentary (Slaughterhouse is set in the context of World War II). Vonnegut runs with his authentic experience of the bombing of Dresden and creates a decidedly absurdist work: “[t]he terrific acceleration of the [flying] saucer as it left Earth twisted Billy’s slumbering body, distorted his face, sent him back to the war” (77). The juxtaposition of the narrative techniques used in these texts begs the question: the specific experiences that O’Brien and Vonnegut went through, were they a requirement to write with the techniques that they did? If given O’Brien’s life, would Vonnegut write like O’Brien? And vice versa? It is an interesting conundrum. However, the human condition is not so predictable, and specific life experiences don’t always produce identical mental results. It is also worth mentioning that experiences don’t necessarily dictate narrative technique at all- the vengeful hand of a literary god