I chose to read O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” due to its fascinating style of writing. It has this small yet powerful story hidden amongst all this military artillery and combat gear. O’Brien very carefully and cleverly opens this story with a seemingly never-ending list of, well, “Things They Carried”, justifying the title. Within this incredible amount of items that O’Brien intertwines the personal items and the story behind some of them, namely the story behind Lieutenant Jimmy Cross. Lieutenant Cross’s story unfolds through the third-person omniscient because O’Brien knows all the things that Jimmy Cross thinks that none of Cross’s platoon knows he’s thinking. “Lieutenant Cross felt the pain. He blamed himself.” (667) Through trinkets that Martha had sent Lieutenant Cross he was able to imagine a world with her in it as his love, and due to the monotonous boredom that comes along with heavy loads and tediously long days away from civilization Lieutenant Cross allowed his mind to become consumed with thoughts of her. O’Brien states one of the most impactful lines when he states “Imagination was a killer.” Throughout all that these men were forced, chosen, and chose to carry, Lieutenant Cross chose to force his self to carry the guilt of not having prevented Lavenders’ death. He chose to place the blame on his wandering mind that was intricately woven into all of these items. “Lavender was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame.” (676) In this blame Cross now burdened as his own, he became not only the antagonist but also the protagonist as well, in a man vs. self type of conflict. A man died on his watch there was no one else to blame, his platoon did nothing wrong and even the enemy, the mostly invisible enemy could not be the sole bearers of the blame. No, it was the man who was put in charge of keeping this platoon safe and his men alive. By carefully ticking off each and every item the platoon men needed, wanted, and chose to carry O’Brien was able to shape each character individually as well, as a unit. Which did the right thing of presenting this platoon as a band of brothers, which is hat they solider into each of them from day one. Had Lieutenant Cross not had his head in the clouds daydreaming about a love he manifested in his lonely hours, then he might have been able to keep Lavender alive, or so O’Brien would have us believe Cross feels through his sequential list of events that happened to this one specific platoon.
War stories are ridiculously hard to tell when the writer or storyteller has never actually been to war. So, by O’Brien carefully listening to his friends tell their war stories he was able to make a list of war-related details, which just so happen to work extremely well at effectively setting the stage for his piece without deriving from the list itself except to background and anchor Lieutenant Cross’s items. It is the items and their respective journeys with their respective solider that set the stage for where they are located. Simple dialogue for emotional effect carries the reader even further along in their trek to Than Khe. “They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.” (672) These words strung together in a checklist, ticked off kind of way helps to add to the setting which aids in describing how each solider could become a part of their surroundings or, such as with Lieutenant Cross, lost in thoughts that took them away from the visions of destruction and isolation that kept them moving “humping” forward.
Works Cited:
- Charters, Ann. “The Things They Carried.” The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, 9th ed., Bedford/St. Martin's, pp. 664–677.
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