834 O’Brien, Tim
who is careful to highlight the mediated, fictive
nature of his writings. A key premise of the novel
is that stories are true whether or not they relate
“actual” events. In one story, we learn of a character’s
guilt over allowing a fellow soldier to die, and then
we learn that it was actually the narrator who let the
character die. After telling us about a man he killed
with a grenade, the narrator later tells us he watched
the man die but did not kill him, then follows that
with, “Even that story is made up.” Each of the
stories recounts incidents from the war that try to
find perspective in the events and to humanize the
men who were involved with the purpose of rescuing
them from their deaths. In many ways, the point of
The Things They Carried is to examine the nature of
storytelling itself and to discover how we use nar-
rative to construct our understanding of events that
would otherwise seem random, pointless, and cruel.
Themes that inform the novel include cruelty,
death, gender, grief, guilt, heroism, innocence
and experience, spirituality, and violence.
Michael Little
Gender in The Things They Carried
There are very few women in The Things They Car-
ried, and all that we know about them is what we
are told by the male characters who love, admire,
or observe them, but for whom the women are inac-
cessible. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carries a picture of
Martha, who he knows does not love him; Norman
Bowker drives aimlessly around a lake after the war,
imagining conversations with Sally Kramer as if she
were not now married and named Sally Gustafson;
Rat Kiley writes a warm and thoughtful letter to
the sister of a dead soldier, but she never writes
back; and the novel ends with the narrator telling
us about his childhood love for Linda, who died
at nine years old. All of these women are remem-
bered, filtered through the memories, imaginations,
and emotional projections of men, all of whom
want something that the women cannot or will not
provide: Cross wants Martha to love him, Bowker
wants Sally to listen to him, Kiley wants the sister
to acknowledge him, and the narrator wants Linda
to offer him some solace and perspective.
The men in The Things They Carried need
women to provide for them, but all of the women
remain out of reach, unbounded by the role each
man wants for her. This is perhaps most strikingly
true in the story of high-school sweethearts Mark
Fossie and Mary Anne Bell. Fossie manages to
bring Mary Anne to join him at the medical aid
station to which he is posted, and she immediately
begins asking questions about munitions, helping
during emergencies, and insisting she be allowed
to visit a nearby village. One night she disappears
altogether, only to return from a mission with a unit
of Green Berets. Fossie confronts her in private, and
she arrives at the mess hall wearing “a white blouse,
a navy blue skirt, and a pair of plain black flats”; her
hair is “freshly shampooed.” Fossie’s efforts to force
Mary Anne back into the role he wants her to play
are short-lived, however: Mary Anne continues on
patrols with the Green Berets for weeks at a time,
and then she even splits with the Green Berets,
melting into the jungle, becoming “part of the land,”
and seen in glimpses and shadows “wearing her
culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human
tongues.”
None of the men question the way they insist
on projecting roles onto women, even as the women
regularly refuse to submit to those roles. Moreover,
none of the men question the ways their behavior
embodies stereotypically masculine roles as fighters
and leaders. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, in fact, con-
sciously embraces his leadership role after one of his
soldiers is killed. Cross blames himself for concen-
trating on his love for Martha—he has been reading
letters from Martha, staring at her picture, carrying
a lucky pebble from her in his mouth—over the
task of leading and protecting his men. He discards
everything physical and psychological that distracts
him from war, rejecting everything feminine and
emotional for things masculine and hard. “He would
dispense with love,” require discipline from his sol-
diers, and accept the responsibility for their deaths:
“He would be a man about it.”
The Things They Carried presents stereotypical
gender roles and does little explicitly to interrogate
them, but that is not to say that the novel does not
invite us to interrogate those roles ourselves. How-
ever, all of the women in the novel are presented to
us through levels of mediation, and those mediating
influences are always engendered as male. In this