Research Guide to American Literature

2. Timmerman posits that a key question addressed by The Things They Car-
   ried is, “Can one capture the reality of the event in such a way that the reader
   imaginatively participates in it?” O’Brien has said he believes the book has as
   much to do with epistemology as it does with war (Patrick Hicks interview).
   In various interviews and essays he has asserted that he can write a factual
   account of something that happened while he was a soldier in Vietnam, and
   readers will understand little, but that he can write a fictional account and
   come closer to the emotional truth of the experiences. Students would find it
   fruitful to read the essays by Calloway, Timmerman, and Benjamin Goluboff
   and then consider the status of fact, fiction, and truth as they are presented in
   The Things They Carried.


3. In “The Mystery of My Lai” in Facing My Lai: Moving beyond the Massacre,
   edited by David L. Anderson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998),
   pp. 171–178, O’Brien says, “We live in this weird culture where we think
   everything can be helped and healed.... I think that we’ve healed the wounds
   too well, if anything. The country [America] has obliterated the horror that
   was Vietnam. To the Vietnamese people who lost whole families or lost legs
   and arms, we’ve healed it too damn well. We’ve obliterated it from the national
   consciousness, just as we obliterated what happened to the American Indians.”
   In other essays and in interviews O’Brien has expressed his outrage over the
   lack of concern shown by most Americans over what happened to the Viet-
   namese people during the conflict, including his disgust at the American pre-
   occupation with finding and identifying the remains of Americans who were
   missing in action while giving no thought to the thousands of Vietnamese
   killed but never identified nor acknowledged. Students could explore whether
   this awareness of the losses of the Vietnamese people is reflected in any of
   the stories in The Things They Carried. “The Man I Killed” is a good starting
   place. O’Brien’s essay “The Vietnam in Me” will be helpful, as would the Debra
   Shostak and Daniel Bourne and the Patrick Hicks interviews.


4. The author of The Things They Carried is Tim O’Brien, who served as a foot
   soldier in Vietnam on a 1969–1970 tour of duty, has since become an interna-
   tionally acclaimed writer, and now lives in Texas. The narrator of The Things
   They Carried is also named Tim O’Brien. This “Tim O’Brien” appears as a
   character in the collection at three different ages: as a nine-year-old boy in
   love with a young girl who dies of brain cancer, as a soldier in Vietnam, and
   as a forty-three-year-old writer looking back on his experiences in Vietnam
   and sometimes visiting with his former fellow platoon members, in particu-
   lar Jimmy Cross and Norman Bowker. Students might find it interesting to
   explore the different Tim O’Briens associated with the book. How is each dis-
   tinct from the others? What does this confusion of identities allow the actual
   writer to accomplish? The Calloway article, as well as those by Timmerman
   and Steve Kaplan, should be consulted.


5. Up to the Iraq War, a common first instinct was to think of war as a primarily
   masculine experience. Many scholars have offered fruitful gender analysis of
   The Things They Carried and other Vietnam War literature. The short story
   “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” particularly invites gender analysis with its

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