The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien, 1990
Politics & society Historical fiction
A Vietnam platoon's burdens, told as linked stories that mix memoir and invention to argue a made-up thing can be truer than what happened. The linked stories carry you through dread and memory in plain, sometimes lyrical prose, with the war's violence always close.
Feels like dread and awe. About war and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want war fiction that questions how memory and invention shape truth, told in short linked pieces. Be aware that the language is often profane and the battlefield violence is explicit.
Why read it
It shows how a story can hold what happened and what didn't, and why that distinction matters when you're trying to tell the truth about a war.
A page from the book
What it means for a story to be true when it never happened.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man” and other guys start to smile but he’s dead. That’s a true story that never happened. Tim O'Brien.O'Brien was drafted in 1968, two years out of Macalester College, opposed the war, and went anyway; he has called himself a coward for it ever since.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Things They Carried for me?
- You may like it if you want war fiction that questions how memory and invention shape truth, told in short linked pieces. Be aware that the language is often profane and the battlefield violence is explicit.
- What is The Things They Carried like?
- The linked stories carry you through dread and memory in plain, sometimes lyrical prose, with the war's violence always close. Feels like dread and awe. About war and memory.
- What should I read after The Things They Carried?
- If you liked The Things They Carried, try Between Shades of Gray (Ruta Sepetys), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway) and The Women (Kristin Hannah).
A taste of the feed
The morning a boy's life is priced, and the price fits in a pocket.
Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.
Between Shades of Gray · Ruta Sepetys
The inventory a man takes once dying has stopped frightening him.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
For Whom the Bell Tolls · Ernest Hemingway
What it means when a five-year-old stops seeing the soldiers at all.
As they turned to enter their building, both girls looked straight ahead, toward the door. They did it purposely so that they would not catch the eyes or the attention of two more soldiers, who stood with their guns on this corner as well. Kirsti scurried ahead of them through the door, chattering about the picture she was bringing home from kindergarten to show Mama. For Kirsti, the soldiers were simply part of the landscape, something that had always been there, on every corner, as unimportant as lampposts, throughout her remembered life.
Number the Stars · Lois Lowry
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