The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Amazing. O’Brien was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for “The Things They Carried.” He received much well-deserved praise. O’Brien turned his own experience as a Vietnam veteran into beautiful words, for a masterful collection of stories.

It is hard to categorize this particular work. This book blends styles—memoir, short stories, fiction, non-fiction. The theme is a soldier’s time in the Vietnam War, but the focus is on the myriad of experiences, from different perspectives. Bravery, cowardice, pride, horror, sorrow, hope…these are some of the emotions are touched upon. I loved the words…loved the rhythm. This is a book I will read again and again. O’Brien is a special soul, I could feel his heart through his words.

War is a hard subject to depict. For the men and women who have experienced it, I’m sure that a book never gets the feeling just right. I felt that O’Brien’s short stories showed a range of emotion that could be identified with. It was complex and respectful.

Is the truth really static? Or can truth vary by circumstance or perspective? These are not shallow stories, but ones that make you think and then think again. I encourage everyone who loves literature to read this book!


Some quotes from “The Things They Carried:

“They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

“Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. ”

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

“But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.”

“In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”

“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.”

“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
“you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.”

“I survived, but it's not a happy ending.”

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”