O’Brien says that stories can make the dead come back to life through remembering. O’Brien explains a story of about the first dead body he witnessed in Vietnam of an old Vietnamese man. Other people in the platoon to the dead man in a mocking manner: One man proposed a slice of bread to the corpse, but O’Brien would not participate. O’Brien says that the corpse reminded him of Linda, a girl she used to know, then O’Brien all over sudden segues into the story about Linda. Despite the fact that O’Brien was only nine years of age in those times, he had a strong belief that he was in love with her age mate Linda. On top of the matter, he believed that their love was real, not a fake one.
In 1956, during the spring season, the then young O’Brien escorted her lover on their first date that was chaperoned by his parents. The young lover birds entered World War II movie whose premise tricked the Germans by throwing away a corpse of a soldier in a uniform of a British soldier and planted deceptive documents on the body (O'Brien 401). Though the movie upset O’Brien, Linda seemed excited.
O’Brien then remembers how the Vietnamese had their methods to make their dead to seem as still alive through the manner they talked and thought about the corpse. In Vietnam, the dead would be kept alive with stories, such as the tales of Ted Lavender’s demise and others told and embellished by Rat Kiley. Returning to his senses about the death of Linda, O’Brien explains how his dad took him to the morgue to view her body. He remembers how he came up with stories to make Linda appear in his dreams. In his dreams, he could figure them walking, and ice skating and Linda would give insights into life and death. Even at the age of forty-three, he still dreams Linda alive and sees her in her dreams, as he sees Ted lavender and others. The middle-aged O’Brien, a writer, understands that he saving his childhood self, Timmy, with a great story.
Analysis
O’Brien uses language and telling stories to postpone loss. This is observed through the paradox in the title of the chapter; “O’Brien” brings characters back to their life, animating and supposing them beyond the limits of sensory life, one of its kind. It is a way of escapism, a manner to imagine about a case from a vantage point to realize it a different way. Inside the novel, the character uses this type of mental escapism when considering of home and more memories as it offers a familiar comfort and a manner to impose meaning on sense.
O’Brien presents are a rather complicated narrative situation in his final chapter as it attempts to make logic of the many tales that have been told and repeated over the years. O’Brien gives readers a story within a story. The general frame of the story is one of its kind, an author, and veteran imagining of Vietnam. As he collects and gives the story about the animation of the corpse by the Vietnamese, another story inside that story comes up; he recollects the demise of his childhood sweetheart. The layer of tales presents the might of stories as means of ordering scenes of life-solving the responses these events.
Work cited
Bloom, Harold. Tim O'Brien's the Things They Carried. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Internet resource.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: Work of Fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Internet resource.
O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried: Work of Fiction. N.Y: Broadway Books, 1998. Print.
