In Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," an American platoon experiences horror, death and loss in the jungles of Vietnam, all while carrying various objects of both practical and personal significance to them. O'Brien's language in this story, as he delineates and describes in great detail the appearance and source of all of these objects and what they mean to the soldiers, is scattered and stream-of-consciousness at times. This is meant to convey the abstract importance of these things in the soldiers' lives; some of them, like the M-16, are supposed to protect them, while others, like Lt. Cross' letters from his romantic interest Martha, carry emotional and spiritual significance. O'Brien's story is a tale of men lost in foreign territory, of the horrors of Vietnam, and of the nature of writing and understanding our own lives - many metafictional and biographical elements come together to create a work of exemplary realism and interesting symbolism.
The use of the objects to show character and humanity to this group of men in "The Things They Carried" is one of O'Brien's strengths in the short story. When one of their company, Tim Lavender, dies, the rest of the men appropriate his things, in many ways appropriating parts of him as well - by smoking his marijuana and noting his abuse of tranquilizers, they get to know him through his objects. They wonder what it is like to suddenly be alive one moment, then dead the next, like Lavender was; O'Brien notes the importance these objects hold in bringing structure, hope and sense to the men's lives. In this short story, Vietnam is shown to be a horrific and chaotic place, where your life can be taken from you at a moment's notice; it is only through the things they carry that they are able to maintain their humanity (Calloway, 1995).
Much of Lt. Cross' experiences (and the details of the story itself) are based in O'Brien's actual time in Vietnam, making it a uniquely metafictional work. At the same time, the experiences Cross relays to the reader through O'Brien's words can be called into question, making him a very unreliable narrator. The amount of autobiography found in this story creates a metafictional link between O'Brien's experiences and the contents of these stories. O'Brien also notes unique ways to involve the reader in creating their own interpretations of the text - there are several places in the story where the author is asked to test or evaluate the veracity of these stories, in order to discern a greater truth (Calloway, 1995). These occasions include Cross' relationship with the letters - throughout the story, we question Cross and Martha's real story; Cross acts as though he is in a real relationship, but in fact he is deluding himself, holding on to false hope. This act of delusion and storytelling is a metafictional echo of O'Brien's own work with "The Things They Carried" - with this story, O'Brien seeks to contain and quantify his Vietnam experiences in a structural narrative.
The story's function as a Vietnam narrative also contributes to the metafictional links O'Brien creates between his characters and his life. The characters in "The Things They Carried" conduct their operations in Quang Ngai province, a real area of operations during the Vietnam War; many of the divisions, locations and rivers identified in the story actually existed in the history of the war. This brings the story closer to realism than fiction; it ceases to truly be an artifact of magic realism and becomes more of a stylized document of O'Brien's experiences in the War (Goluboff, 2004). Given this focus on verisimilitude and reality when it comes to the actual details of Vietnam, the fact that Cross' personal story, and the experiences of the characters in his work, are so subjective and malleable is indicative of O'Brien's own need to make sense of his time in the war.
That being said, it is impossible to completely trust the accounts of Lt. Cross within "The Things They Carried." Given his own uncertainty and the horrors of war, his own narrative might be delusion that he manufactures in order to deal with the stresses of combat (Kaplan, 1993). O'Brien is honest about this lack of reliability, his characters openly stating their lack of understanding about what they are doing and why they are in Vietnam. The nature of reality is often called into question, and the line between ally and enemy is often blurred depending on the situation. O'Brien's use of imagination in his characters, particularly Lt. Cross, are done as a means to understand the complexities and uncertainties about the Vietnam war. This includes the subtextual meaning of the "things they carried" as a psychological barometer for each soldier's fears, anxieties and hopes, Lt. Cross' relationship with the girl in his letters, and more - O'Brien constantly provides the reader with multiple likely interpretations of an event.
References
Calloway, C. (1995). 'How to tell a true war story': Metafiction in The things they carried. Critique 36(4): 249.
Goluboff, B. (2004). Tim O'Brien's Quang Ngai. ANQ 17(2): 53-58.
Kaplan, S. (1993). The undying uncertainty of the narrator in Tim O'Brien's The things they carried. Critique 35(1): 43.
