Title: The Things They Carried
Author: Tim O'Brien
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year: 1990
Pages: 273
Genre: Historical/Realistic Fiction, Memoir
Themes: War, Survival, Courage
Age Level: 10th Grade and Up
While I sometimes share reviews I've written of young adult novels on my adult book review blog (Book Addict Reviews), I have never posted the other way. But when my daughter recommended I read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien after reading it in her junior level English class (my daughter, whose last recommendation to me was Twilight when she was 13), I figured I'd better read it. And she was right-this book says things that need to be said about war and courage, and I think that those things should be said to our youth. So, you'll find my review below, not in the usual format, but here all the same.
Summary and Review:
I was born in 1970. So while my life overlaps briefly with the Viet
Nam War, I have no real memory of it. What I do remember is going to
downtown Chicago with my granny, and later with my parents, and seeing
the faces of the homeless vets that were begging on the streets.
Wild-eyed, or blank-stared, the memories of their faces color everything
that I have heard, read, or seen about the war since. And I have
heard, read, and seen a lot. Stories from the fathers of friends who
fought in the war, lessons from school, movies like Full Metal Jacket
and Platoon-from these sources I have cobbled together a picture of that
hot, wet, chaotic, horrific place and time.
But
I am not sure that I have truly felt that I had even the faintest
understanding of what it might actually have been like. Not, that is,
until I read Tim O'Brien's stunning book The Things They Carried.
Neither entirely fact nor entirely fiction, O'Brien uses a series of
short stories and vignettes to tell the tale of Alpha Company, a group
of soldiers based, in part, on the real men that O'Brien served with
during the war. The stories meander from stateside to the jungles of
Viet Nam, from childhood to middle age, detailing how each experience
prepares or informs or explains the person that Tim was or is or may yet
become.
I will admit to having some difficulty at
first with the non-linear narrative, and with the fact that I was never
sure what was true and what was made-up. But the genius of this work is
that you soon realize that it doesn't matter. In fact, the way that
the book is put together and the inability to tell fact from fiction
ends up doing a better job describing what living through that
experience was like than any straight forward telling could. O'Brien
and his fellow soldiers lived a reality that most of us will never
experience, and can never truly comprehend, where time was skewed, day
and night traded places, where extraordinary circumstances became
ordinary, and where the ordinary world as most of us know it became a
dream that you couldn't let yourself believe in.
My
favorite section of the book (if favorite is even the right word) is the
story of how O'Brien almost ran away to Canada rather than go to war.
Part of O'Brien's extreme talent is an ability to use words to paint not
just a visual but an emotional picture for the reader, and I was able
to feel how deeply terrified he was at the prospect of war. I felt his
ambivalence about running away, about choosing the possibility of death
over the certainty of shame and embarrassment. But the thing I found
most stunning, and the line I would consider the most "controversial" of
the whole piece, is this, "I passed through towns with familiar names,
through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Viet Nam,
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 war."
Given the
hyper-patriotism of the US since 9-11, and our unquestioning assumption
that every soldier is brave and heroic, this simple statement stopped
me dead in my tracks. It felt almost sacrilegious. Are we allowed to
say that not going to war is more courageous than going? What does that
say about us as a society, that we are find ourselves so often in armed
conflicts? Is it bravery and strength, or is it because we don't want
to be judged as wanting by the rest of the world? What would happen if
our young men and women, en masse, simply refused to go the next time we
try to send them into harm's way? Would it be courageous or cowardly?
Regardless of where any one of us comes down on that particular idea,
what O'Brien's work has done is illustrate for those of us that weren't
there that nothing is as simple and straightforward in war as those of
us sitting at home watching it on our televisions thinks it is.
Teaching Resources:
National Endowment for the Arts Teaching Guide
ReadWriteThink Lesson Plans
Web English Teacher Lesson Plans
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
Labels:
courage,
historical fiction,
memoir,
survival,
war,
young adult
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