Marxist Literary Analysis

In The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, O’Brien uses many short stories to describe his experience in Vietnam. The story that captured many aspects of writing was “How to Tell a True War Story” because it acts as a guide to writing a true story. O’Brien uses many different rhetorical strategies, narrative techniques, and establishes a theme in this story to help develop his characters and story line.

Written by author Tim O’Brien after his own experience in Vietnam, “The Things They Carried” is a short story that introduces the reader to the experiences of soldiers away at war. O’Brien uses potent metaphors with a third person narrator to shape each character. In doing so, the reader is able to sympathize with the internal and external struggles the men endure. These symbolic comparisons often give even the smallest details great literary weight, due to their dual meanings. The symbolism in “The Things They Carried” guides the reader through the complex development of characters by establishing their humanity during the inhumane circumstance of war, articulating what the men need for emotional and spiritual survival, and by revealing

The Things They Carried is a collection of stories about the Vietnam War that the author, Tim O’Brien, uses to convey his experiences and feelings about the war. The book is filled with stories about the men of Alpha Company and their lives in Vietnam and afterwards back in the United States. O’Brien captures the reader with graphic descriptions of the war that make one feel as if they were in Vietnam. The characters are unique and the reader feels sadness and compassion for them by the end of the novel. To O’Brien the novel is not only a compilation of stories, but also a release of the fears, sadness, and anger that he has felt because of the Vietnam War.

The distractions of war, misinterpretation of reality and limited control of fate as a result of the human condition appear throughout the Vietnam War at all times. Tim O’Brien, as a narrator describes the struggles of storytelling during and after the war. The constant struggle to determine reality versus personal perception arises in many aspects of his memory. Some factors of recalling events are uncontrollable such as interference of imagination and uncertainty as a result of the human condition. In Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the telling of story-truth, rather than happening-truth, is necessary, as no replica can be as genuine as the original.

In “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien uses this story as a coping mechanism; to tell part of his stories and others that are fiction from the Vietnamese War. This is shown by using a fictions character’s voice, deeper meaning in what soldier’s carried, motivation in decision making, telling a war story, becoming a new person and the outcome of a war in one person. Tim O’ Brien uses a psychological approach to tell his sorrows, and some happiness from his stories from the war. Each part, each story is supposed to represent a deeper meaning on how O’Brien dealt, and will deal with his past. In war, a way to

O'Brien gives his characters lives outside the story and dedicates his fiction to their memory. In On the Rainy River, for example, O'Brien writes that he never really thanked the old man

Growing up, many young boys idolized the war heroes in movies such as Saving Private Ryan and American Sniper. However, the glorified heroism that is depicted in these films is far from the reality that is war. A more realistic rendition of war is seen in Tim O’Brien’s short story, The Things They Carried. Throughout the story, O’Brien uses metafictional characters to portray the physical and emotional burdens carried by American soldiers who were forced to conform to societal expectations upon being drafted for the Vietnam War. The literary elements O’Brien uses throughout the story to convey this theme are symbolism, imagery, tone, and inner conflict of the protagonist.

In Tim’s first up-close and personal encounter with death, Linda, his girlfriend, dies of cancer before turning ten. When Tim attends her wake and sees her body, he is unable to cope with the reality of her death. Instead, he imagines that she is awake and normal and having a conversation with him. Through this conversation with a dead person, Tim comes to realize that his imagination - the stories that he makes up - can keep people alive after their deaths. If he remembers Linda’s corpse, that is all she can ever be, but if he continues to have conversations with her, to imagine her alive, to tell stories about her, then she remains alive as he portrays her. Though told at the end of the book, this vignette becomes a lens through which Tim views death throughout and explains why Tim, the character, and O’brien, the author, tell stories about dead friends. Tim tells stories about death - the death of his friend Kiowa, the postwar suicide of Norman Bowker, the corpse of the man he killed, the tragic accident that killed Ted Lavender, and Linda’s battle with cancer - to preserve the life of people he

In the chapter, “The Lives of the Dead”, Tim O’Brien focuses on an episode from his childhood rather than one from the war. This creates confusion because O’Brien’s entire story is centered around his experiences in the Vietnam War. Although he does not directly use or refer to the word “war”, the episode does contribute to the theme of the book. Earlier in the book O’Brien explains that stories and memories were what kept him alive. Meanwhile, in “The Lives of the Dead”, he says, “We kept the dead alive with stories” (“The Lives of the Dead” P.226).

O’Brien gives the audience insight to what life is like for an average soldier in Vietnam using imagery to describe the sights, smells, sounds, and poor living and working conditions of the platoon’s current location in Vietnam. He does not use personal pronouns here in order to separate himself from the situation and give a more objective description of the soldier's surroundings. He writes this way because none of the soldiers want to take the responsibility for such a sensible soldier’s death, they all feel equally as guilty for his death. Similarly, in “The Man I Killed,” character, Tim O’Brien describes how the man that he killed had his jaw “in in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, [and] his other eye was a star-shaped hole” (O’Brien, 124). He is ashamed of himself for this and rarely uses personal pronouns as to show that he is not the same person now, that he was back then.

Likewise, I’d also insist to mention the heavy opposition and disgust O’brien reflected upon himself as he recalled working in the slaughterhouse before he began his service. Carrying the draft notice in his pocket, he spent his remaining days surrounded by death. The strongest interpretation I received from his isolation and disgust, was how he related this environment to his mere experience in the war. Not being able to get rid of the aroma of blood, trauma and death off of him. “Even after a hot bath, scrubbing hard, the stink was always there--like old bacon, or sausage, a dense greasy pig-stink that soaked deep into my skin and hair (Pg. 42, O’brien).” Personally, This relates more to life in war It occurs to me that once you have experienced a traumatic event, dealing with death or witnessing someone's death, you simply cannot unsee it. However, his mental dilemma begins to occur once he finds himself taking a ride in his father’s car feeling paralyzed, and cornered. It’s almost as if he is frightened for himself. As mentioned earlier, he felt as if he was going to be involved with fighting a war with no purpose. This leads the audience into a transition of witnessing him standing his ground when it came to opposing the war, however now he begins to realize that disagreeing with the war was not

Many have struggled with the “truth” behind of one of O’Brien’s most famous works, The Things They Carried, a compilation of tales of the Vietnam War that stand alone just as strongly as they weave together. O’Brien, a Vietnam veteran, writes of his personal experiences while simultaneously warning the reader of its fiction through introduction of “story truth” and “happening-truth”, leading the reader to question where he draws this line. These built up war stories come together to create an exceptional piece of work, allowing the individual to choose how perceive the different definitions of “truth”. O’Brien’s use of metafiction, the tool defined by the author drawing attention to the novels

As a liberal arts student, I find that my version of reality is often challenged. This sounds like a frightening statement, and it is; however, this is the fate of an avid learner. Every sensation and perception one experiences changes our perspective; in other words, alters our reality. This distortion of reality is taken to the extreme in times of war, as O’Brien is faced with atrocities associated with war, death in particular. As O’Brien often changes perspectives between chapters, is it apparent that his description of death changes as he is progressively exposed to new and strange side of human nature that has been previously unknown to him.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of multiple short stories about Tim O’Brien’s, recollections of his time as a soldier in the Vietnam War. This novel depicts the experiences and effects of the Vietnam war on the lives of the American soldiers. O’Brien informs the readers that the stories may not be completely true or moral but that’s the point of a true war story. In the novel, O’Brien introduces characters by the items they carried. The thoughts of women or items women had given to these men were often recognized in the book. O’Brien incorporated a few female characters such as Martha, Mary Anne Bell, and Henry Dobbins’s girlfriend in order to show the influence they all had on the men in the novel. Though the

While literary critics do attempt to elaborate or develop ideas articulated by Karl Marx, it is important and necessary to make a distinction between Marx's specific socio-economic and political agenda and the body of literary theory which emerged years later. Marxist literary criticism proceeds from the fundamental philosophical assumption that "consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence...Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (Marx 568-9). Marxist critics use this challenge to the notion of an innate, prefigured, individual human nature to reexamine the nature of creative or literary authority.