The things they carried: The untrue story of a real soldier
...th the reader. Modernist and postmodernist authors are known for having and egocentric and selfish approach towards their readers. Most of them are only concerned in what they think and expressing their ideas without any restriction is their main concern. O’brien for sure wants to express his ideas, but his main goal is to be understood. He has an specific message (tell the truth of the war) who has an specific target: Everybody. Therefore O’Brien uses a magnificent style in which he approaches directly to the reader, he chats with you, sometimes he confronts you are asks for your opinion or for your emotions, he jokes with you and these all contributes to his desperate need to make you understand the war, the reason for it, and why do people go to war. “Even now, as I write this, I can feel the tightness. And I want you to feel it […] You’re twenty-one years old, you are scared […] What would you do? […] Would you feel like dying? Would you cry as I did?” (60). In this passage of the novel Tim tells us how he decided to go to war in a river on the Canadian border as he was considering fleeing the country to escape the draft. By approaching directly to you he demands you to forget about your preconceived thoughts and that certain ”I would have done this or that” without really knowing what it feels like to be in that position, without personally relating to the character. O’brien effectively relates us to the pressures that we all would feel in a decision like that: patriotism, the fear of being called a coward, the fear of family deception, etc. However after his war experience he confronts these “pressures” which very often are our morals and values by accepting that we all should be true to ourselves and that no pressures or values are worth enough to justify war. Even if the events of the rainy river are fictional, according to author Carl Horner, this episode helps the reader to understand O’Brien’s autobiographical anguish and the reasons why he thinks that going to war is a decision taken by social pressures and not by individual choice. (Horner, 260). Being untrue to yourself is what he calls real coward ness. “[…] And then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” (61). By relating both author and narrator in the same situation O’Brien effectively creates an intimate bound with the reader making his story more credible and also helping himself to heal his scars by telling them to an audience he wants to reach. Author Robin Blyn explains: “The idea of stories as a curative force is attractive[…], as a collection of stories about American soldiers in Viet Nam. The Things They Carried performs the narrative the narrative cure it prescribes, redeeming the reader and the writer at once”. (Blyn, 189). The first short story of the book which has the same title: The things they carried is a preamble, a some kind subtle summary of all the topics in which the whole books develops. In the middle of it we have the “love story” of LT. Jimmy Cross which continually interacts with the stories of the other soldier and with the story of the war experience itself as well. The chronological plot of the story is somehow irrelevant to the true meaning of this first tale that O’brien delivers. For one thing the climax of the story (Ted Lavender’s death) is known in the first lines of the story. There is not surprise effect, or a Hollywood style final battle or heroic deed which is typical in typical war stories. The true plot develops in the common retina of the soldiers’ live, it relies on an emotional climax which solely happens in the soldiers minds and emotions, hopes and deceptions as well. There is clear writing style difference that O’brien uses to differentiate between the real physical world and the subjective world. When Obrien talks about the war and the physical things that the soldiers carried, he is concise and precise totally lacking of emotional or aesthetic qualities. “The things they carried, were largely determined by necessity […] p-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs wristwatches, dog tags…” (2) However, there is the subject world, like for example, Jimmy Crosse’s daydreams where the emotions are depicted with idyllic imagery and aesthetic quality: “And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love.” (11) . O’brien wants to talk of something more than the physical things they carried. He tries to show us the emotional things they carried. In their aesthetic, reporting style narrate when he describes the physical things they carried he suddenly and progressively changes to the portray of the description of the emotional things they carried and there he uses a more aesthetic, more human, a beautiful poetic style in which he introduces us to the things that weighted the most: Their emotions. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might died. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles had their own mass and gravity, they had tangible weight.” (21). According to author Steven P. Liparulo in his essay “Incense and Ashes”: The Postmodern Work of refutation in Three Vietnam Novels, this first chapter offers a very deep ambiguity of whether the plot is about Jimmy Cross’s love story or Ted Lavender’s death, and also of whether the physical descriptions of daily routine military objects have more weight than the soldiers’ psychological possessions in order to prove the point that “We can reread […] the opening chapter[…], as building on a tension between materialist and humanist understandings of the war experience.” (76). Even though the novel is an attempt to make us all understand the truth about Vietnam, O’Brien has an ideal reader, a kind of reader for whom the message is more directed: Women. During the novel O’Brien depicts female characters as the most distant and careless individuals towards the conflict and the sorrow and difficult situation of those (men) who fought the war. According to author Pamela Smiley in her essay “The Role of the Ideal (Female) Reader in Tim O’Brien’s The things they Carried: Wh...