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The Things They Carried - by Tim O'Brien
This is a collection of short stories through the eyes of an American soldier in the Vietnam War.
Metafiction
The Things They Carried works heavily with metafiction, employing a writing style that mixes the factual with the fictional.
This helps distinguish O’Brien’s literary approach from other authors. The Things They Carried is presented as fiction, but is couched in O’Brien’s experiences, lending truth and validity to the events told in the book.
Consider what O'Brien writes in his collection of stories about the importance of story telling :
'That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story'.
What does O'Brien mean?
The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong is the strangest in his collection. Somehow one of the soldier's girlfriends Mary Anne comes to Vietnam and decides to stay. She completely changes and becomes a fighter herself.
One day she appears wearing a necklace of tongues. The medic, Rat Kiley, describes her as a person who has "tasted" the war as other civilians back home have not. Mary Anne says, "Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country -- the dirt, the death -- I just want to eat it and have it there inside me." For Mary Anne, coming to Vietnam irrevocably changed her. She found something in life she wanted to consume and in the end the country, the jungle, the war consumed her.
O'Brien shows through this that war completely changes people, although his story is imaginative and exaggerated.
STUDENT ACTIVITY
You need to begin considering how you will use your knowledge of war studied in history in a short story narrative.
The form can be graphic novel, diary entries, a simple short story OR a form you decide upon.
Which historic war or pivotal event in a war will you choose?
Write as many ideas as you can and discuss with a family member - or record your ideas to show your peers and teacher in the next class.
What ideas about war do you want to present in your story?
Is it about heroism, the futility of the war, individuals who survive? Is it from a soldier's point of view, or perhaps a Jewish concentration camp survivor? The possibilities are endless.
Present your ideas to the class when you can.