The Things They Carried (1990) - Tim O'Brien

The Things They Carried (1990) – Tim O’Brien
Broadway, 248 pages, ISBN 9780767902892

(photo credit: www.goodreads.com)

Awards:

National Book Critics Circle Award, 1990

Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger (best foreign work of fiction), 1990

Pulitzer Prize finalist, 1990



Annotation: The soldiers of Alpha Company march through the midst of the Vietnam War, a war they scarcely understand in a place that they cannot explain. Through a series of related short stories, O’Brien shows readers both the horrors of war and the bond that soldier share.

Review: Each of the short stories that make up The Things They Carried connects to create a unified work that expertly shows the humor, horror, madness, camaraderie, helplessness, hopelessness, pain, and even excitement of war. Although Vietnam is the setting of the work, O’Brien is more concerned with telling the (fictional) stories of the men of Alpha Company rather than examining the war itself.

The men in O’Brien’s company (The author also appears as a character.) each have their own stories, reflecting not only their individual backgrounds and beliefs, but also their fears, hopes, sense of lost innocence, and sometimes even joys. These characters are also us, reflecting the state of an America trying to grasp the meaning of the Vietnam War. These stories are fictional, but as one character says in “Good Form,” “Story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.” Like war itself, The Things They Carried is gut-wrenching, horrific, sad and painful, but also uplifting and hopeful.