The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
Broadway Books edition 1998, copyright 1990
trade paperback, 246 pages
ISBN-13: 9780767902892
short stories

highly recommended

From the Publisher

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.

My Thoughts:

The Things they Carried contains elements of a memoir, and a novel about the Vietnam War. Some of this group of collected short stories are fiction, some non-fiction. Many of the stories can stand alone as short stories, but all of them are interconnected. I found the title piece to be the strongest, but there were other selections that were also quite haunting. Highly Recommended

Quotes:

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. opening

The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water. Together these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. pg. 2

Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet." pg. 3

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. pg. 7

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. pg.14

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing - these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. pg. 21

Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried through our lives. pg. 27

If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. pg. 34

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths, You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened....and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain. pg. 158