00 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Steve Kaplan, “The Undying Uncertainty of the Narrator in Tim O’Brien’s The
Things They Carried,” Critique, 35 (Fall 1993): 43–52.
Explores the obliteration of the line between fact and fiction in the text to show
how O’Brien convinces readers they are hearing “truth” about what it was like for
an American soldier to be in the Vietnam War.
Don Lee, “About Tim O’Brien: A Profile,” Ploughshares, 21 (Winter 1995–1996);
<www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=3989> [accessed 6 Decem-
ber 2009].
Brief but informative profile of the author.
Farrell O’Gorham, “The Things They Carried As Composite Novel,” War, Literature,
and the Arts, 10 (Fall 1998): 289–309.
Argues that the fairly recent label “composite novel” best suits the form of The
Things They Carried and that its goal is to explore, beyond the situational setting of
a war, human experience and the human heart.
Robin Silbergleid, “Making Things Present: Tim O’Brien’s Autobiographical
Metafiction,” Contemporary Literature, 50 (Spring 2009): 129–155.
Focuses on The Things They Carried as a Postmodernist text, discussing its play with
notions of truth and the narrative ethics that arise from that play, and offers the
term “autobiographical metafiction” as a descriptive label.
Pamela Smiley, “The Role of the Ideal (Female) Reader in Tim O’Brien’s The Things
They Carried,” Massachusetts Review, 43 (Winter 2002–2003): 602–613.
Thought-provoking article that argues that O’Brien constructs his ideal reader
within the text as female, and that he ultimately redefines masculinity.
Lorrie Smith, “‘The Things Men Do’: The Gendered Subtext in Tim O’Brien’s
Esquire Stories,” Critique, 36 (Fall 1994): 16–40.
Provides close readings of some of the stories that make up The Things They Car-
ried and argues that they ultimately take a masculinist perspective that leaves her
“uncomfortable” as a female reader.
John H. Timmerman, “Tim O’Brien and the Art of the True War Story: ‘Night
March’ and ‘Speaking of Courage,’” Twentieth Century Literature, 46 (Spring
2000): 100–114.
Compares O’Brien’s frequently anthologized “Night March,” which was first pub-
lished as “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?” and also appears as a chapter
in Going after Cacciato, with “Speaking of Courage” in The Things They Carried to
discuss the issue of telling a “true war story” and the “interplay between reality as
data and the reality of the human spirit.”
Alex Vernon, Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim
O’Brien (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004).
Discusses O’Brien’s resistance to being a soldier and the role of storytelling, pilgrim-
age, and gender in his work, arguing in part that even the fiction not centered on
war experiences is permeated by the views he gained as a soldier.
—Kathryn West