THE CRAFT OF THE SHORT STORY IN RETELLING THE VIET NAM WAR: TIM
O'BRIEN'S THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
Janis E Haswell. The South Carolina Review. Clemson: Fall 2004. Vol. 37, Iss. 1; pg. 94, 16
pgs
Abstract (Summary)
Tim O'Brien's novalesque sequence of stories, The Things They Carried, is now a mainstay of
the American Viet Nam War canon. The Things they carried is in fact a thoughtful and reflexive
inquiry into the moral consequences of the violence and carnage of war. Haswell offers her
interpretation of Things They Carried and traces the textual development that underpins it.
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Tim O'Brien's novelesque sequence of stories, The Things They Carried, is now a mainstay of
the American Viet Nam War canon. A veteran of the war, O'Brien crafted these stories over an
extended period of time, publishing single pieces between 1976-1990, then compiling them into
a carefully orchestrated sequence that became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Critics Award in 1990. Analyzing the textual evolution of Things-in terms of the final
sequencing and ultimate published versions of the stories-helps readers recognize the moral
import of O'Brien's message. That is to say, though heralded by some critics as the quintessential
postmodern treatment of Viet Nam, The Things They Carried is in fact a thoughtful and reflexive
inquiry into the moral consequences of the violence and carnage of war.
Before offering my interpretation of Things and tracing the textual development that underpins
it, I would like to set the stage by unpacking the key terms in the claim I have just made. First, I
am using the term "sequence" after the fashion of M. L. Rosenthal and Sally M. Gall, who
identified the sequence as a unique facet of modernist poetry. "More successfully than individual
short lyrics ... it fulfills the need for encompassment of disparate and often powerfully opposed
tonalities and energies" (3). Cautioning against reading the sequence as "a mere thought" or
"biographical shade" (4), Rosenthal and Gall speak about the presence of "passionate
preoccupation" and "radiant centers" that work "neither to resolve a problem nor to conclude an
action but to achieve the keenest, most open realisation possible" (9, 11; italics in origin).
This characteristic of modernist poetry suits O'Brien's collection remarkably well. O'Bnen offers
multiple insights (not a single "mere thought") in fiction that transcends his personal experiences
in the war ("biographical shade"), ultimately offering to readers "open realisation" rather than a
narrow or neat vision. The arrangement of the stories in Things obviously works sequentially,
where story #2 is understood in relationship to story #1 rather than in isolation. But each story is
further embedded so that the full implications of story #1 is not revealed apart from an
understanding of story #2 or #12.1 Such sequencing heightens the impact of each story compared
to how it reads in stand-alone form. Just as important, these carefully sequenced stories create-in
their confluence-an "I-narrator" whose presence unifies and depends upon the collection. Both
the embedded, "radiant centers" of meaning and the narrator's voice are direct products of this
ensemble of stones.
Certainly O'Brien's collection puts a new spin on the sequence, with the hyper selfconsciousness
that is characteristic of postmodern prose. Indeed, the canonical status of The Things They
Carried can be attributed to its "postmodern" character,2 a second key element in my claim.
Finding in O'Bnen "the anti-totalizing strains of postmodernism" are critics like Jim Neilson,
Philip Beidler, and Catherine Galloway ("Pluralities"), to name a few. These strains are
identified most easily through the structure or form of the collection, a form that implies, even
enacts, its thematic elements. First, the Viet Nam War in its "unreality" and "hallucinatory
mood" defies our attempts to know and understand it (Neilson, WarringFiction 195).3 Catherine
Galloway notes that we have to "piece together information, such as the circumstances
surrounding the characters' deaths, in the same manner that the characters must piece together the
reality of the war, or, for that matter, Curt Lemon's body" ("How to Tell a True War Story"). Our
failure to understand is grounded not so much in the horror and violence of war itself, but in the
nature of personal experience. What O'Brien offers (and what critics affirm) is not a report of the
war, but a "rehappening" shaped by memory and imagination, making story-telling or writing
itself on par with the war as the subject of the collection.4
The structure of Things confirms this interpretation. The narrator offers multiple versions of
various episodes (the deaths of Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, Kiowa, and a nameless Viet Cong).
These versions are often contradictory, each one presented as "true" but later renounced as false.
The narrator corrects his "mistakes," then adds, "Even that story is made up" (203). Rather than
being guilty of fabricating events, the narrator ultimately insists that there is a distinction
between "story-truth" and "happening-truth" (203). "Truth" is not mimetic; it is felt in the guts
(84). Thus readers are forced into the same confused and chaotic flux as soldiers in the midst of
war, sorting through impressions and perceptions, faltering in their attempt to lay hands on a
clear "lesson."
This postmodern meta-analysis of how life and fiction are interconnected prompts Mark Heberle
to laud O'Brien as the most important novelist to emerge from the Viet Nam War. Other critics,
however, see the postmodern cast to O'Brien's stories as debilitating, if not downright
irresponsible. They argue that discussion of the Viet Nam War without a moral or political edge
reduces Things to linguistic trickery, or worse, to ethnocentric propaganda and nihilistic mockery
(Christopher 2; see also Neilson, "Truth"). Insofar as O'Brien enmeshes the reader in a labyrinth
of memory and personal experience, the war is reduced to subjective sensation and refashioning
reflection "devoid of political content and devoid of sense"(Christopher 6). What in fact is still
being waged is, for Renny Christopher, an "ongoing meta-war," which makes Viet Nam an
"American reality"(4). Such a meta-war helps readers forget about the carnage of the event, Jim
Neilson argues ("Truth"). That is, we are off the hook in terms of "the responsibility of
remembering and understanding" {Warring Fictions 197). Once allotted solely to the discursive
level, the meaning of the Viet Nam War is ideologically suspended from the workings of real
politics and power (Martin 7). If O'Brien's position is what Heberle interprets it to be, then
Things is solipsistic and ethnocentric, leaving the Vietnamese and the facts of the war out of his
picture (Neilson, Warring Fictions 204-5). Even worse, the blurred boundary between fact and
fiction is an authoritarian act (199) in that such practice allows American culture to maintain the
status quo (200). If O'Brien and his admirers embrace an apolitical, postmodern perspective, this
argument concludes, they avoid "serious ideological and materialist critique, while seeming to do
the opposite" (209).
The charge that postmodernism is politically and morally crippled certainly is not a new one.
Applied to The Things They Carried, however, the reasoning is nearly syllogistic: O'Brien's
collection is postmodern, postmodern literature rejects claims of truth in political and moral
affairs, therefore the theme of Things cannot be political or moral in nature. I will leave the
question as to whether O'Brien is politically indifferent for others to argue. To accuse O'Brien of
being morally insensitive is to seriously misread the sequence of stories we are examining.
The crux of the issue-whether Things nullifies any claim about human truth(s), moral
responsibility, or evil motives, actions, and consequences-resides in what has become a
commonplace in literary studies: the distinction between author and narrator (and this is the third
key element of my claim). Since Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, it has been rudimentary
to distinguish between the real author (the "real man") and the implied author ("the inferred,
ideal, literary, created version") as well as between the implied author and the narrator (54-55).
So it seems neither radical nor problematic to read O'Bricn's narrator as "a demonstrable,
recognizable entity immanent to the narrative itself" as opposed to the novel's implied author
"revealed in the design of the whole" (Chatman 148).
Yet readers of Things are aware that the demarcation between author and narrator is
problematized by the fluid interface between fiction and memoir. The narrator identifies himself
by name ("Tim O'Brien"), age (forty-three in 1991) and occupation (a writer). His stories are
clearly rooted in the author's real-life experiences. Yet in "Field Trip" the narrator's ten year-old
daughter accompanies him back to Vie t Nam, a daughter who does not exist in the author's life.
Aside from his age and veteran status, the narrator ultimately confesses: "almost everything else
is invented" (O'Brien, Things 203).
The author O'Brien offers this clarification: "The guy who's narrating this story ["How to Tell a
True War Story"] has my name and a lot of my characteristics .... I blended my own personality
with the stories," he explains. But what seems as a simple transference of identity is not. "[I]t
isn't really me .... everything is made up, including the commentary" (qtd in Napersteck). Here
the line between fact and fiction seems clear, at least to the author himself. If the events,
thoughts, feelings, and attitudes pervading the stories are "made up," then they should be
attributed to the I-narrator, who is also made up. Yet O'Brien suggests that he consciously
reinvented himself through his fiction to the point where "I'm not even sure that my own life
even happened any more" (qtd. in Heberle xxiii).
Hyperbolic claims about how life follows art follows life notwithstanding, it is clear that
identifying the author's message with the narrator's perspective is a choice critics make in order
to further a particular reading of the texts in question. It is the consensus of most, for instance,
that narrator and author speak with one voice in the following passage from "How to Tell a True
War Story":
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of
proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story
seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that
some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made
the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.
(O'Brien, Things 76)
Here the narrator intrusively instructs the reader on the limitations of his own stories. All the
pieties about heroism, about moral cause and venerable tradition, are, cast in derisive doubt. The
war provides no redemptive lessons, no consolatory tale, no moral perspective. Because this
claim also reveals the author's position, the argument goes, the ultimate message of Things is that
while stories can save the past by making things present, they do not teach, they can only
preserve.5
But is the narrator simply a thinly veiled reflection of the author? Mark Heberle believes so,
arguing that in O'Brien's examination of "the undoing of character" in war, he constructs a
literary representation of trauma (4). In revisiting traumatic experiences through memory and
fiction, O'Brien replicates trauma therapy and attempts to recover himself, thus rewriting "not
only his own experiences but himself" (xxi). All of O'Brien's fictional protagonists and narrators
are versions of himself, Heberle argues, his fiction "a personal working out of trauma through
refabrication" (xiii).6 Heberle concludes that historical fact and imagined fiction become
interchangeable, thereby erasing differences among "personal traumatization and retrospective
narrative, authorial and fictional identity, actual experience and literary figuration" (xxiii).
Lynn Wharton agrees with Heberle that O'Brien's fictional or narrative "I" is "a very
particularised, re-worked version of his own self." Yet one difference between implied author
and narrator remains obvious: although a real part of O'Brien's personality, the narrator "lives for
a short while for the purposes of narrating and Unking the book's stories" (Wharton). But there is
a second, more important distinction. Wharton believes that O'Brien allows "the nature or
circumstances of the fictitious self [the implied author] to change as the book progresses"-the
author is changed by the writing. But the I-narrator remains the same-a self "neither improved
nor degraded.. . . he is not changed in any greatly significant way," and so achieves "neither
salvation nor nemesis." On this level, then, there is "no explanation, no enlightenment, no final
exegesis" (Wharton).
While I agree with Wharton that this I-narrator is a textual construct, taking form in these
particular stories, I would go further. This speaker (the narrating "Tim O'Brien") comes into
existence only as the author revised and assembled these stories for the collection we know as
The Things They Carried. That is, O'Brien either named a previously unidentified, first-person
narrator, or renamed a first-person narrator, as "Tim O'Brien." In doing so, the real author creates
a narrative consciousness that is unified, not fragmentary. Therefore, rather than a postmodern
sense of self symbolized by Curt Lemon (his body parts displaced in tree limbs), and rather than
an incoherent, traumatized speaker cut off from his past and from his pre-trauma world, O'Brien
consciously crafts a unified narrator to articulate an explicit moral message: that the pre-war and
post-war self are in fact one unified person, despite the psychological, emotional, and moral
calamity brought on by violence and trauma.
To rephrase my claim, then. O'Brien's short-story sequence works toward "the keenest, most
open realization possible," reaching a critical mass and a thematic climax in the final story. As I
will show, the closing tale is redemptive in its moral message. That meaning does not stand
autonomously, however, but is interwoven into an embedded, interconnected, and self-referential
sequence of stories. Support for my interpretation involves analyzing both the structure of this
collection and the textual histories of some of the individual stories. A tangle, to be sure, but
ultimately revelatory.
An Alternative Reading of The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien's narrator says of story telling: "[I]t's not a game, it's a form" (Things 203). What
does this statement mean? The form is story itself, with rules and expectations that O'Brien's
most cynical and stereotypical soldier-characters understand. The ground rules for this form are
laid out in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." Here Rat Kiley tells a story of outlandish, even
impossible premise: Eddie Diamond ships his girlfriend over to Viet Nam, pink sweater and all.
The seemingly unbelievable is accepted by Kiowa's buddies as an allowable aspect to story
telling. What cannot be tolerated (from the teller's point of view) is disbelief on the part of his
listeners (108) and (from the listeners' point of view) claims of verisimilitude on the part of the
teller. Defending the facts of the account "just breaks the spell," Mitchell Sanders complains to
Kiley. "It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the
hell out of the way and let it tell itself" (116). As Kiley recounts the once-innocent girl slowly
transforming into a killer, he defends the tale's credibility. But Sanders again insists: '"The whole
tone, man, you're wrecking it .... Stick to what happened .... tell it right'" (117). When Kiley stops
in midsentence, unable to explain what finally happens to Mary Anne, Sanders demands an
ending. "It's against the rules .... against human nature' (122).
O'Brien places his readers in the role of Kiley's friends. The self-conscious, intrusive narrator of
'Things is like Rat Kiley, who breaks the spell of his tales by confessing inventions, identifying
personal experience, lying, then feeling contrite about his lies. As we follow his talcs, we
realized that yes, we feel cheated "if it never happened," if the story isn't grounded in reality (89).
But that is our mistake, expecting "absolute occurrence" between story and fact (89). Not all the
tales of O'Brien's narrator are "happening-truth." But they are "story-truths"-they are true
precisely because they are story (203). Ultimately, O'Bnen-as-author makes readers remember
we are in a book, not a psyche. Pay attention, he challenges us, get to the core at the center of
this labyrinth, this, "great ghostly fog" (88) even when the narrator doesn't "tell it right."7
Thus readers must navigate the hesitations and redirections that animate these stories-not because
we trust the narrator, but because we believe in stories. Rather than despairing of ever hearing a
true war story, we become actively enthralled in one that both reminds us we are in a story, not a
war, and at the same time achieves O'Brien's purpose as an author: to teach his readers-to
"provide insight, philosophy" (qtd. in Meas 44). That is, while O'Brien the author speaks of the
complexity and ambiguity of moral issues, and of his reluctance to preach a moral lesson, his
stones are moral-not moralistic-in subject and intent.8 The core of O'Brien's stones, the "true
core of fiction," is (in his own words) "the exploration of substantive, important human values"
(qtd. in Hcberle 35). More precisely, his subject in Things is the violation of moral innocence.
O'Brien's own explanations support such an interpretation. In an interview with Michael Coffey,
he explains that as a writer he seeks "to arrive at some kind of spiritual truth that one can't
discover simply by recording the world-as-it-is. We're inventing and using imagination for
sublime reasons-to get at the essence of things, not merely the surface" (qtd. in "[William]
Tim[othy] O'Brien"; italics added).
The moral import of Things is evident most directly in the second half of the collection, where
O'Brien sequences a cluster of stories concerning the death of Kiowa. In terms of the event itself,
the facts seem clear enough. One night the platoon makes camp on the banks of a river; unknown
to them is that this site is also the village latrine. It begins to rain; mud and human waste mingle
and deepen until movement is difficult. Then mortars begin to fall, killing Kiowa. His body sinks
into the waste, and friends are unable to extract him until the next day.
This story is told and retold in various ways. In "Speaking of Courage" Norman Bowker
confesses his part in not being able to pull Kiowa's submerged body out of the mud. Bowker
distinguishes between common valor ("the routine, daily stuff-just humping, just enduring...that
was worth something, wasn't it?") and the act of uncommon valor (pulling the body of Kiowa out
of the mud) that he finally was incapable of doing. "I had the chance and I blew it. The stink,
that's what got to me. I couldn't take that goddamn awful smell' (Things 162).
In "Notes," the narrator intrudes into the mystery of Kiowa's death, declaring that Bowker was
not responsible for freezing up: "That part of the story is my own" (182). The next story, "In the
Field," explains the narrator's admission, but tells about the role of the real culprit, "the young
boy," from an omniscient, third-person perspective. The boy needs to explain his part,
recognizing "his own guilt" and wanting "only to lay out the full causes" (192). Yet he cannot
find anyone to listen to him even when he blurts out: "I got to explain something" (198). Lt.
Cross, who camped the squad on the banks of the river despite the warnings of women in the
nearby village, cannot listen because of his own guilt: "A stupid mistake. That's all it was, a
mistake, but it had killed Kiowa" (191).
Why third person in this ultimate confession from a speaker who previously had no trouble
writing himself into the story? There are several possibilities: he wants to universalize the
experience, or he still cannot own the responsibility of his actions. But there is another reasonperhaps a truer one. Clearly, the narrator feels alienated from the young boy who arrived in Viet
Nam and who was still innocent, confused, and unscathed, the boy who later wandered the
muddy river banks having "lost everything. He'd lost Kiowa and his weapon and his flashlight
and his girlfriend's picture .... He remembered wondering if he could lose himself" (193).
This sense of loss is reiterated in "Field Trip." The narrator revisits the banks of the river twentyfive years later to pay tribute to his friend, Kiowa. But this place had robbed him of more than
his friend. "This little field, I thought, had swallowed so much. My best friend. My pride. My
belief in myself as a man of some small dignity and courage .... I blamed this place for what I
had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been" (210). I am no longer
that person, the speaker confesses. The "Tim" during and after the war is not the "Timmy" of his
pre-war self.
How far we have come, it seems, from discovering who killed Kiowa. The complexity of
O'Brien's structure can be understood more easily through a simple heuristic.
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Anatomy of a Moral Lesson
Each time the speaker revises the narrative, the reader hopes to get at the real, factual truth about
what happened and who was responsible. "When a man died, there had to be blame" (198).
Readers stand on the banks of the river with the narrator, trying to get back to this neat, compact
center square in the middle of this nest of stories. But each chapter seems to function as a selfcontained box encasing yet another layer of mystery, of ostrepification. Like Sanders, we rage
against the teller because there is no ending to his story.
Or is there? In the final chapter, "The Lives of the Dead," the teller discloses his love for Linda,
who died of a brain tumor years ago. Just as he dreamed Linda alive when he was nine, the
narrator speaks of her now, "making the dead talk" (261). If stories can "save us" and telling
stories can resurrect Linda, then (as Mark Heberle observes), Kiowa can also be saved, along
with the old man whose corpse the soldiers bade farewell to, and the narrator himself (Heberle
213).
But Kiowa is more than a literal victim; he is a metaphoric one-and here "happening truth" gives
way to "story truth." We have a corpse called "Kiowa," literally the narrator's friend and
comrade-in-arms. But who else has died? The real corpse in the muddy river bank belongs to
"that naive kid" the narrator believes he has left behind in "the waste of Vietnam" (Things 210).
The mystery at the center of this nest of stories isn't who killed Kiowa. Nor is it who killed
Timmy, although the narrator had blamed the war "for taking away the person I had once been"
(210). The question is, who really needs saving-not Kiowa, not Linda, but Timmy. Thus as the
narrator tells the story of his first, lost love, he is "trying to save Timmy's life with a story"
(273)-Timmy, once given up for dead, Timmy who "smiles at Tim from the graying photographs
of that time" (267). As both Linda and Timmy speak to him, as he literally tugs at the boot of
Kiowa (and metaphorically of Timmy), O'Brien reveals a transformative moment for his narrator
who has storied himself to a fundamental, moral insight: "the essence remains the same ... I
know my own eyes-and there is no doubt that the Timmy smiling at the camera is the Tim I am
now. Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging. The
human life is all one thing" (265).
Critics who argue that O'Brien's narrator does not grow in self knowledge are correct-but only
until this point. "The human life is all one thing." The narrator might feel fragmented, alienated
from his youth, his innocence, that pure love of adolescence. But stories "make things present"
(204), things carried in and beyond the war, like Timmy who loved and grieved. This person is
whole. Timmy is Tim; they share "that same pinprick of absolute lasting light" (267). There is a
moral continuum to this person-Timmy and Tim are both capable of love, loyalty, and honor.
This insight marks true healing, O'Brien is telling us, knowing that you are whole, knowing that
you are still, and always have been, a responsible moral agent. By meeting Timmy again, Tim is
able to pull the boot out of the waste and save the corpse-literally of Kiowa, metaphorically of
his own moral innocence-but only through the process of writing, rewriting, telling, retelling,
over many years.9
The tale of Timmy is a consolatory one, although this moment of reconciliation seems fragile
and precarious. But isn't that because the starting point of healing is the end point of the book? If
we follow the story-telling pattern, we should fully expect this illuminating moment (what
Edward Hagan and John Briggs would called epiphanic) to flow into yet another memory,
another episode from the war, another story, were there yet a page to turn. That page remains
unwritten-at least by O'Brien, who refuses to be moralistic but who tells stories of human beings
acting in circumstances that are ultimately mora/in scope and significance. The full meaning of
this story-truth may be "just beyond telling," in the quiet center of "a great ghostly fog" with
"spiritual texture" where "right spills over into wrong" (Things 79, 84, 88). Such terrain does not
mark the absence of moral sense but an examination and intensification of it.
Textual Development of The Things They Carried
This interpretation of The Things They Carried as a work of moral consequence is grounded in
the sequencing of stories themselves-O'Brien's deliberate orchestration of theme through form.
The sequence reveals O'Brien's "passionate preoccupation," using Rosenthal and Gall's terms. In
addition to this interweaving of stories as a basis for my interpretation of Things, I turn now to
another source of evidence: the textual history of key stories in O'Brien's collection.
There has been limited attention paid to the textual history of the stories, although Mark Heberle
and John H. Timmerman have discussed the publishing history of some of them. "Speaking of
Courage," which has received the bulk of scholarly attention in terms of its textual evolution,
was the first story published. Not only has O'Brien himself described the development of this
story in an interview, but "O'Brien" the narrator spells out its evolution in "Notes," a tale written
for and placed strategically within the final collection. In his interview, O'Brien reveals that
"Speaking of Courage" began with a letter he received '"from a guy named Norman Bowker, a
real guy [whom O'Brien had known in Viet Nam], who committed suicide after I received his
letter .... he asked me to write a story about it, and I did"' (qtd. in Naparsteck).
In "Notes" we also learn that the story-as-text takes on the same complexities as the story-asrelationship between O'Brien and Bowker. Bowker writes his letter to O'Brien after he has read
If I Die in a Combat Zone, urging the novelist to articulate the difficulties veterans face in
seeking meaning in their post-war lives, a story Bowker confesses he is unable to write. In 1976
O'Brien publishes the initial "Speaking of Courage," with the main character not Norman
Bowker but Paul Berlin, who is the protagonist in O'Brien's novel-in-progress, Going after
Cacciato. But Berlin's post-war experiences don't fit into a novel about the war, and what was
intended to be a chapter in Cacciato is discarded until "1990," or the publication of the second
articulation of "Speaking of Courage" in Things-long after Bowker's suicide in 1978. A complex
publishing history: novel, letter, story-unwritten, story, chapter-aborted, reincarnated story, and
of course Bowker's permanent silence.
According to the 1976 version of "Speaking of Courage," Paul Berlin (the protagonist and a
college graduate) futilely hopes for a conversation with his father about the death of fellow
soldier, Frenchie Tucker, a tunnel rat shot in the neck and killed. Berlin "knew that he might
have won a Silver Star, like Frenchie, if he'd been able to finish what I'ienchie started in the foul
tunnel" (250). As Berlin drives around and around the town's lake, he imagines his father being
open to his war stories. But in truth, "nobody was there to listen, and nobody knew a damn about
the war because nobody believed it was really a war at all. It was not a war for war stories, or
talk of valor, and nobody asked questions about the details. . . . everyone knows already that it
hadn't been a war like other wars" (250). Berlin's condition thus stems from a generational
tension between himself and those men who fought real wars and thus had true war stories to tell.
Symbolically, Berlin is trapped in a tunnel of his own, where he cannot feel the warmth of
sunlight, hear the voices of other men, or tell them his story. "There was no one to talk to, and
nothing to say" (253).
Within the final version of "Speaking" (again told in third person), Norman Bowker-a high
school graduate-finds himself silenced both by his father (too involved in his baseball games)
and his former sweetheart, Sally Gustafson, formerly Kramer. In his orbits around the lake he
relives the death of Kiowa on the muddy shitfield along a river bank. When Kiowa is hit by
mortar fire and sinks into the mud, Bowker tries to pull him out. But "suddenly he felt himself
going too. He could taste it. The shit was in his nose and eyes .... the stink was everywhere . . .
and he could no longer tolerate it" (Things 168). He should have been brave enough to hang on,
he later thinks. "If it hadn't been for that smell, I could've won the Silver Star" (169). Deleted are
the references to how stories from his war are rejected by the townspeople. Bowker accepts the
fact that his fellow citizens don't want "to know about the terrible stink. They wanted good
intentions and good deeds" (169). Symbolically, Bowker is "folded in with the war; he was part
of the waste" on that river bank (172).
In "Notes" (one of the few stories original to the published collection) we are told that
artistically, the narrator (who identifies himself as the writer of "Speaking of Courage") "lost the
natural counterpoint between the lake and the field" (180). Thematically, he had ruined the tale
"by a failure to tell the full and exact truth about our night in the shit field" (181). Certainly both
admissions are true, and the commentary helpful. The other chapters in the collection, however,
don't come with explanations of their birth and evolution. Readers must thereby construct a
rationale and purpose from the specific changes produced in their revision. Comparing several
stories with their antecedents reveals that in some cases, O'Brien transposed tales whole cloth,
changing nary a word, as in the case of the title story itself, "The Things They Carried," and "In
the Field." Sometimes changes are only minor, even in crucial stories like "The Lives of the
Dead," where O'Brien simply adjusts the date of narration from 1988 to 1990, along with the age
of the narrator from forty-one to forty-three. In the original version of "Field Trip," the narrator
returns to Kiowa's death site and, as a tribute to his friend (or an offering of atonement or a gift
to the sullen Vietnamese farmer who watches this strange American) buries Kiowa's hatchet in
the sandy river bottom. In the revised version, the narrator returns Kiowa's moccasins and
releases them to the current. Was the original act of "burying the hatchet" too trite? Do
moccasins suggest a path followed or shoes unfilled? Readers can only guess.
At other times, however, changes of a few words are clearly intended to enhance a thematic
thread that O'Brien uses to weave together into a novelesque-whole what originally were
separate and disconnected stories. For instance, in "In the Field" Lt. Jimmy Cross, who blames
himself for Kiowa's death, notices a "young soldier standing alone." The boy confesses his own
hand in the matter, since he had drawn fire as he showed Kiowa a picture of his girl friend. But
who is the boy? In the original version, he remains anonymous. But in the final version we
discover his identity, not from any lines changed in the story but from its positioning, coming as
it does after "Notes." In the closing lines of "Notes" the narrator reveals that "Norman [Bowker]
did not experience 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" (Things 182). Thus the "young soldier" is a younger
version of the narrator himself.
This contrast in versions signals a significant pattern that holds true throughout the sequence: the
narrator's identity as a writer and story teller is deliberately emphasized. In the first "Field Trip,"
the story opens: "Twenty years after leaving Vietnam, I returned with my daughter Kathleen"
(78). Here the narrator identifies himself as a veteran and family man. The opening of the final
version reads: "A few months after completing 'In the Field' I returned with my daughter to
Vietnam . . ." (207). Not only is this narrator a family man and veteran but a writer, and a
successful one.
And what values does this writer-narrator hold? When comparing versions of "How To Tell a
True War Story," among what appear minor editing changes are shifts in the thematic message.
In the 1987 story, the narrator comments: "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your
sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing much is ever
very true" (214; italics added). In the final draft, the same lines end: "it's safe to say that m a true
war story nothing is ever absolutely true" (88; italics added). "Ever very" and "absolute" are
quite different claims, calling to question whether O'Brien is arguing for unbridled skepticism, as
some critics have interpreted. O'Brien makes a similar move a few paragraphs later, when in the
first publication he writes: "Yet even if it did happen-and maybe it did, anything's possible-even
then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth.
Happeningness is irrelevant " (214; italics added). Compare this to the version in Things'."... A
true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant" (89;
italics added). It may be difficult to define philosophically the difference between
"happeningness" (an unfortunate term) and "absolute occurrence" (akin to the earlier "absolutely
true" phrase), but clearly in both of these cases the narrator is alerting the reader to the pitfalls of
extreme claims about truth, or absolute distinctions between events in the outer world and
internal or psychological events. In the revised story, the narrator is not claiming that there are no
truth(s) but rather that the narrated event is always changed in the narrating event. These
revisions also show that one's world is not identical to one's mind.
And now one final textual comparison. My interpretation of O'Brien's message is supported by
very suggestive changes in the 1990 versions of "The Ghost Soldiers," a tale that at first seems
only to interrupt the flow of stories animated by the Kiowa metaphor, placed as it is after "Field
Trip" and preceding "The Lives of the Dead." Rather than being misplaced, it proves the lynch
pin of the embedded structure we have examined. The changes in "Ghost Soldiers" are many,
beginning with the distance between the narrator in Things and the original narrator, one
"Herbie" who serves in Delta Company (not Alpha), is a
Boston Red Sox (not
Minnesota Twins) fan, has not been to college, and weeps under pressure. The medic of the
company is Teddy Thatcher, who unlike Rat Kiley, is killed in combat and replaced by
Jorgenson, who (according to both versions of the story) panics during his first fire fight and
nearly costs the narrator his life.
In the 1981 version, there is a powerful sense of shame involved with Herbie's wound. He makes
continual references to the amount of pain he endured: "torn-up muscle, nerves like live electric
wires" (92). Just as difficult, it seems, are the rude jokes about his "diaper rash" or "butt rot" that
the hospital nurses would sprinkle with talcum power: "Git-cha-goo, git-cha-goo" (92). When
Jorgenson asks Herbie to forgive him, the narrator responds, "Kiss it....Lick it, kiss it" (93).
Herbie not only wants to find ways to make Jorgenson suffer (92), he wants to humiliate him.
According to this first version, Jorgenson is belittled as "a bona fide card-carrying twit. The
tiniest arms and wrists I'd ever seen .... He looked so mournful and puppydoggish" (93). In fact,
he is dehumanized to the point that readers never learn his first name. Matters worsen when
Herbie realizes that during his time in the hospital away from his comrades Jorgenson has been
accepted into the company, making Herbie the outsider, as Curt Lemon makes clear: 'You've lost
touch, man. Jorgenson . . . he's with us now" (93). To his pain, shame, and rage, Herbie must add
jealousy. Someone must punish Jorgenson, "show him some ghosts" (94, 95).
"Ghosts" refers to the enemy who could "spook" American troops as they stood watch at night.
"The countryside was spooky: snipers, tunnels, ancestor worship, ancient papa-saris, incense.
The land was haunted .... odd shapes swirling in the dark; phantoms; apparitions; spirits in the
abandoned pagodas; boogeymen in sandals .... It was ghost country, and Charlie was the main
ghost" (95). Herbie and Azar's game played against Jorgenson that night made these ghosts come
to life: "slowly, slowly we dragged the tin cans closer to Jorgenson's bunker, and this, plus the
moon, gave a sense of creeping peril, the slow tightening of a noose" (97).
With the reshaping of the narrator (and of course the substitution of Mitchell Sanders for Curt
Lemon, killed in an earlier story), "The Ghost Soldiers" in Things develops from a tale of
revenge to one of moral self-realization. Consider what initially seems a minor contrastive
feature. In the original, Herbie confesses: "Naturally there were times when ... I missed the
adventure .... Danger makes things vivid. When you're afraid, really afraid, you taste your own
spit, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention" (92; italics added). In the final
version, the narrator comments:
In an odd way, though, there were times when I missed the adventure, even the danger . . . the
presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.
When you are afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the
world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood-you
give it together, you take it together." (Things 220; italics added)
The revised passage illustrates two contradictory features of the narrator's character. First, there
is the obvious emphasis on belonging, finding kindred spirits in Alpha company. But the narrator
is also suspicious of the hold "adventure" commands in his life. It isn't natural anymore, but odd.
The difference between Herbie and this.narrator, it becomes clear, is that this second one indeed
sees things he never saw before-not only in the world but in himself.
What the "O'Brien" narrator comes to understand is that the ghosts are not simply outside of him,
on the other side of enemy lines in the form of Viet Cong. In a passage entirely new in Things,
he reflects:
Something had gone wrong. I'd come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college
grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, all the credentials, but after seven months in the
bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight
of simply daily realities. I'd turned mean inside. Even a little cruel at times. For all my education,
all my fine liberal values, I now felt a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond
reason. It's a hard thing to admit, even to myself, but I was capable of evil. (227; italics added)10
Perhaps O'Brien had intended Herbie's stinking wound ("Ghost" 95) to suggest moral disease,
but Herbie himself never gets the point. This narrator does. As the game begins, instead of a
"sense of creeping peril, the slow tightening of a noose" (97), the narrator in Things feels "a
sense of approaching peril, the slow belly-down crawl of evil" (Things 236).
At the point when the narrator is most cruel to Jorgensen (first name "Bobby" now, "short and
stumpy-looking" but not a twit), he realizes: "I felt a swell of immense power. It was a feeling
the VC must have ... I felt the hinges go. Eyes closed, I seemed to rise up out of my own body ....
I was invisible; I had no shape, no substance ... I just drifted" (234). He had lost all sense of right
and wrong (234) and thus became less human, more ghostly. Ultimately "I was . . . the cool
phosphorescent shimmer of evil-I was atrocity ... I was the blind stare in the eyes of all those
poor, dead, dumbfuck ex-pals of mine-all the pale young corpses ... I was the beast on their lips .
. . "(235).
Thus evil is one of the things this narrator "carried," a condition of his soul exteriorized in his
cruel game of revenge, perceived at this moment as more diabolic than when he (or one of his
comrades) kills the Viet Cong in "The Man I Killed" or put Kiowa in jeopardy in "In the Field."
Diabolical because the violence is deliberate, intentional, and directed against one of Alpha
company. When the narrator refuses to carry on, Azar kicks him in the head the way a soldier
would desecrate the corpse of an enemy soldier (241). The game has revealed the narrator's
moral corruption-a deadly and death-like state of being.
In the 1981 version, Azar voices the reality of war: the constant proximity, the thin line between
living soldiers and ghost soldiers: "You learn, finally that you'll die. You see the corpses,
sometimes you even kick them, feel the boot against meat" (97). In Things, Azar tells the
narrator: "You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that
gentle, naive kid you used to be ... [but] you can't ever bring any of it back again" (235). With
this revision O'Brien focuses on the chasm between seasoned troops and their own pre-war
selves, between Tim and Timmy, and thus prepares readers for his ultimate reflections in "The
Lives of the Dead." In sum, the revised "The Ghost Soldiers" explicitly defines the moral
parameters of the collection, with the narrator finally revealing the story he has been working up
to telling-about the demise of his illusions about being a civilized man, his moral corruption, and
the impact of that corruption on himself and his companions.
Conclusion
The textual development of the stories in The Things They Carried heightens our appreciation of
the imaginative craft of the author and his message of moral import. O'Brien succeeds in creating
a narrator who habitually objectifies himself (to the point of speaking in third person about his
early days in country), who doesn't let the stories tell themselves, who casts doubt on his
reliability as a story teller. Yet in the very act of telling and retelling, the narrator reaches a
breakthrough moment wherein he acknowledges his alienation from his pre-war self, his moral
responsibility for his actions (not just in Kiowa's death but with the harassment of Jorgenson),
and the ghostly condition that moral corruption entails. Such reflection, O'Brien shows us,
paradoxically restores the connection between Tim and Timmy, so that restoring the moral self
and re-storying that self are the same act.
If The Things They Carried is a preeminent postmodern sequence of stories-and there are surely
reasons to regard it in these terms-then several conclusions suggest themselves. First, O'Brien's
collection combines the meta-consciousness of an intrusive narrator with temporal and structural
fragmentation to create a meta-conceptualization of narrative itself. But O'Brien does not lose
track of the context of his story telling: the Viet Nam War. Telling stories and telling war stories
may mark very distinct functions. The stories O'Brien tells here are moral in character. Tim
O'Brien saves "Timmy's life with a story" (273) and so fulfills his conscious purpose as writer:
"My passion as a human being and as a writer intersect in Vietnam, not in the physical stuff but
in the issues of Vietnam-of courage, rectitude, enlightenment, holiness, trying to do the right
thing in the world" (qtd. in "[William] Tim[othy] O'Brien"). That "right thing" may not be found
in the narrated event of the Viet Nam War, but can exist in the narrating event about the war,
carefully sequenced and revised.
Second, through revision and sequencing, O'Brien's I-narrator develops from a series of disparate
or unidentified speakers to a single, coherent self. Reflective of the unified psyche of the
narrator-as-teller, the narrator-as-veteran ("Tim") recognizes himself in the pre-war innocent of
his past ("Timmy"), suggesting that while the violence of war can mar the moral character of its
participants, moral integrity may be reclaimed. May be, as in the case of the narrator. May not
be, as in the case of Norman Bowker.
And finally, to assume that postmodern literature renounces moral judgments and themes as
naive nioralism will lead to a gross misreading of O'Brien's subtle and moral meditation. The
syllogism proves false (O'Brien's collection is postmodern, postmodern literature rejects claims
of truth in political and moral affairs, therefore the theme of Things cannot be political or moral
in nature) for the warrant is too simplistic. As John S. Nelson has argued, postmodernism and
ethics are not antithetical. Rather than being bereft of ethical positions, postmodernism advances
many "rhetorics of inquiry," one of which is ethics. Such a corrective view of postmodernism
applies to The Things They Carried, worthy of its canonical status for its creative mastery of
story telling and its moral insight into America's Viet Nam experience.
[Footnote]
Notes
1. Readers will be reminded of "Spatial Form" in this technique- also inherited from modernism.
As defined by Joseph Frank, spatiahsm undermines "the inherent consccutivencss of language"
by creating a "time-logic that fits space-logic" (12, 13). Characters and events are understood in
relation to the collection as a whole, which must exist and be known in its "wholeness" before
comparisons and revelations are complete. Thus as readers we must delay our normal processing
until each event or character or feature of the narrator is revealed. Time is thus suspended as each
story is held together (in place) in the mind. Moreover, as Frank notes, "past and present are
apprehended spatially, locked in a timeless unity that . . . eliminates any feeling of sequence [i.e.,
progress] by the very act of juxtaposition" (63). While both these elements are at worksequencing and spatial relationships that suspend timeO'Brien's purposes are not modernist in the
sense that they do not set out to dismantle historical or linear time itself but rather the moral
boundaries between an innocent, pre-war self and the war veteran, as I will show.
2. I am accepting in this discussion fim Ncilson's characterisation of postmodernism in its
insistence on multiple rather than single views to capture the "reality" of an event, its rejection of
teleological accounts of human life and history, its suspicion of human reason as a reliable
behavioral norm, its insistence that no single individual (or ethnic group or nation) holds a
monopoly on the fullness of human experience, and its questioning of supposedly "accurate"
representation that claims to be devoid of ideology ("Truth"). I also heed the warning of Aijaz
Ahmad about the militant nature of the postmodern gospel. "Any attempt to know the world as a
whole, or to hold that it is open to rational comprehension, let alone the desire to change it, was
to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to construct 'grand narratives' and 'totalising
knowledge'" (Ahmad 260). He adds: "If one were to refuse this model of the late-capitalist
market economy, and dared instead to conclude a conversation or to advocate strict partisanship
in the politics of theory, one would then be guilty of rationalism, empiricism, historicism, and all
sorts of other ills" (261).
3. See also David [arraway's argument that true Viet Nam War literature must exist in the realm
of "the unaccountable, the unthinkable, and the unsayable" (700). Jan Matney finds the reader
"as unsure as the Viet Nam soldier in terms of what is true." Catherine Galloway notes that we
have to "piece together information, such as the circumstances surrounding the characters'
deaths, in the same manner that the characters must piece together the reality of the war, or, for
that matter, Curt Lemon's body" ("Metafiction"). See also discussions by Maria S. Bonn and
John H. Timmerman. Some critics End the collapse of absolute distinctions between "fact" and
"Retion" potentially emancipatory, since it can lead to a "radical self-critique" of traditional
myths about American identity (Beidler 3). Andrew Martin, however, questions whether in fact
the war "was a mystery that happened in a place and a time that no one will ever fully
understand" (56).
4. Mark Heberle argues that O'Brien's topic is not war but writing (34). D. J. R. Bruckner
believes the stones in Things form a dialogue about artistic invention in the Homeric tradition.
Maria S. Bonn calls O'Brien the ultimate "literary trickster." with his narrator insisting on the
fictional or imaginary content of his talcs, while the usual conventions of historical memoirs are
employed so that O'Brien consciously merges the genres of fiction, memoir, and biography.
5. See Bonn, "Can Stories Save Us?" and Calloway, "How to Tell a True War Story."
6. Heberle distinguishes between the two by noting that the narrator's traumatized state is enacted
through style, organization, and point of view (15), and perpetuated by the author's resolve to
write about his memories of the war. That is, the author's attempt to heal is the narrator's
retraumatization (27).
7. There are minor additions to the final published version of this story. The most significant
change between the 1989 and the 1990 versions is the elimination of a brief section wherein Rat
Riley (the narrator, in this case) makes explicit the comparison between Mary Anne and every
American soldier: "She wasn't dumb .... I never said that. Young, that's all I said. Like you and
me. A girl, that's the only difference .... I mean, when we first got here-all of us-we were real
young and innocent, full of romantic bullshit, but we learned pretty damn quick. And so did
Mary Anne" ("Sweetheart" 98).
8. As John Timmerman nghtly observes: "there is a difference between exploring the moral
meanings of humans confronting battle and the didactic reduction of that confrontation to moral
precept.... the writer's task is to represent experience authentically so that others understand the
event, and from that understanding they may, if they choose, adduce their own moral lessons."
Critics who argue that O'Brien has no observations to make about good and evil-in the form of
human choice or human action-are in fact accusing the author of moral indifference, which is
precisely what O'Brien is condemning As Daniel Robinson reminds us, being morally indifferent
"illustrates a general loss of humanity" (Robinson).
9. Jim Neilson emphasizes the moral aspect of O'Brien's story as well, arguing that the author
attempts "to achieve psychic wholeness by reconnecting the boy he was before Vietnam with the
man he has become" ("Truth").
10. While moral evil is associated with the out-of-control Azar in the original story, who is
described as having "falcon eyes, ghost eyes," Herbie was never condemned (or selfcondemnatory) but rather an object of pity: "You're a sad case. Sad, sad." ("The Ghost Soldiers"
100, 98, 99).
[Reference]
Works Cited
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Beidler, Philip D. Re- Writing America: Viel Nam Authors in Their Generation. Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1991.
Bonn, Maria S. "Can Stones Save Us? Tim O'Brien and the Efficacy of the Text." CritiqueStudies in Contemporary Fiction 36.1 (1994): 2-15. 10 June 2001
<http://www.texshare.edu/ovidweb/>.
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<http://chss.montclai.edu/english/furr/Viet Nam/callowaythings.html>.
_____ ."Pluralities of Vision: Going After Cacdoto and Tim O'BriEn's Short Fiction." in
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'True' Story." 21 May 2001 <http://www.wcsu.ctstatcu.edu/ ~BRIGGSJP/ Obrienpapcr.htm>.
Heberle, Mark A. A Trauma Artist: Tim 01BrUn and the Fiction of Viet Nam. Iowa City: U of
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Jarraway, David R. '"Kxcrcmcntal Assault' m Tim O'Bnen: Trauma and Recovery in Viet Nam
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<http://www.galcnct.com>.
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_____ .'The Ghost Soldiers." Esquire 95 (1981): 90-3+.
_____ ."How to Tel! a True War Story." Esquire 108 (1987): 208-10+.
_____ ."In the Field." Gentleman's Quarterly 59 (1989): 217+.
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_____ ."Speaking of Courage." The Massachusetts Review 17 (1976): 243-53.
_____ ."Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." Esquire 112 (1989): 94-98.
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Penguin, 1990.
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Contemporary Fiction 403 (1999): 257-64. 10 June 2001 <http://www.tcxsharc.edu/ovidweb/>.
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'Speaking of Courage..'" Twentieth Century Literature 46.1 (2000): 100-14.
Wharton, Lynn. "Tim O'Brien and American National Identity: A Viet Nam Veteran's Imagined
Self in TAe Things They Carried" Paper given at a conference on National Identities, King
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<http://www.galenct.com/>.
Indexing (document details)
Subjects:
Writers, Literary criticism, Vietnam War, Violence
People:
O Brien, Tim
Author(s):
Janis E Haswell
Document types: Commentary
Document
features:
Diagrams
Section:
ESSAY
Publication title: The South Carolina Review. Clemson: Fall 2004. Vol. 37, Iss. 1; pg. 94, 16
pgs
Source type:
Periodical
ISSN:
00383163
ProQuest
document ID:
757578441
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9200
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=757578441&sid=2&Fmt=4&clientId=
1407&RQT=309&VName=PQD
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