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.”
