The Things They Carried 835way, O’Brien offers an implicit commentary about
the men—these particular men—who are think-
ing about women in particular ways. Because the
representations of women are all localized, then, it
would be a mistake to read these representations
as universal. The women in The Things They Car-
ried are projections of male fantasy, hope, and need
(emotional, sexual, psychological), and as such, they
help to focus our sympathies on the internal damage
these men suffer from their experiences at war.
Michael Little
GuILt in The Things They Carried
The title and opening story in The Things They
Carried offers lists of the items each soldier carries
through the jungles of Vietnam. The lists include
tangible items (“They carried Sterno, safety pins,
trip flares, signal flares . . . and much more”), meta-
phorical items (“They carried the land itself. . . .
They carried the sky. . . . [T]hey carried gravity”),
and emotional items (“grief, terror, love, longing”).
Throughout the rest of the novel’s stories, though,
guilt emerges as the one item that they all seem
to carry but cannot share. Some of the guilt these
men feel follows the killing of enemy combatants,
as in the story “The Man I Killed.” The narrator
recounts the aftermath of throwing a grenade that
kills a slight Vietnamese man walking toward him.
The narrator studies the damage caused by a bul-
let to the face, repeating several descriptions and
seemingly unable to acknowledge the efforts of his
friend Kiowa to talk him out of his shock and to
mitigate his feelings of guilt by pointing out that
one of the others would have shot the man had the
narrator not done so: “The guy was dead the second
he stepped on the trail. Understand me? We all had
him zeroed.”
O’Brien pairs guilt and forgiveness in the novel,
indicating that we need forgiveness for our guilt, and
we need to be willing to offer forgiveness to others.
The narrator is shot at one point, and the new medic
has a moment of panic before rallying and saving
the narrator from shock. The narrator is unwilling
to forgive the medic and concocts a plan for revenge
with the help of Azar, a character we have seen to
have a limited capacity for conscientious behavior
and who refuses to let the narrator back down
once the plan is in place. After terrifying the medic
during a night watch, the narrator seeks an uneasy
truce, feeling guilty for his childishness and for his
self-righteous refusal to accept the medic’s sincere
apologies.
A counterpoint to this story is that of the nar-
rator’s own need of forgiveness. At the center of the
novel sits the story of Kiowa’s death, spanning sev-
eral stories and generating complex feelings of guilt
in other characters. We first learn of Kiowa’s death
in “Speaking of Courage,” as we watch Norman
Bowker drive around his hometown’s lake and hold
an imaginary conversation with his father. During a
nighttime mortar bombardment, Kiowa is hit and
begins to sink into a sodden, muddy field that is as
much excrement as mud. Bowker tries to pull Kiowa
up but “suddenly he felt himself going too. He could
taste it. The shit was in his nose and eyes. . . . [A]nd
he could no longer tolerate it. Not here, he thought.
Not like this. He released Kiowa’s boot and watched
it slide away.” In the following story, “Notes,” we
learn that Bowker later killed himself. But we also
learn from the narrator that “Norman did not expe-
rience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze
up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the
story is my own.” And in the story after that, “In
the Field,” we learn that Lieutenant Cross blames
himself for insisting that they camp in that particu-
lar field, in spite of warnings from locals that he has
chosen to ignore.
O’Brien is deliberately slippery throughout The
Things They Carried. In telling the story of Kiowa’s
death, the author obscures culpability: Is it Cross’s
fault for camping in a field that nearby villagers
used to hold sewage? Is it Bowker’s fault for being
too repulsed by the filth to save Kiowa? Or is it the
narrator’s fault, since he claims that he, not Bowker,
actually failed to pull Kiowa out of the muck? In
the end, O’Brien has presented a confusion of guilt
that suggests we all have an individual inclination
to assume guilt. In that case, it does not matter how
much any of us may be objectively to blame for an
outcome. What matters instead is our capacity for
introspection and self-reflection in the service of
understanding why we assume guilt. If the narrator
is truly to blame for Kiowa’s death, then he has tried
to gain perspective on his actions by assigning them