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Personal Annotation Brenda Prescott Annotation on The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
I could say that my husband and I were returning from a mid-December car trip the first time I read the title story of this book. The story reverberated so loudly for me that I immediately went back to the beginning and read it aloud to him. Long before I sat down to analyze it closely, I had to give voice to those mesmerizing rhythms, to the accumulated presence of the general and the particular, and to the rhythmic breaks signaled by the enumeration of weight. I could say that I finished the recitation just as we reached the Cambridge exit on the Mass Pike. Being from the West, my eyes naturally scan the horizon. Just as I closed the book, I noticed two jet fighters rising up low in the eastern sky. I pointed them out to my husband as they streaked away to the right. Occasionally you'll see a formation of military planes high overhead, but they don't usually fly that low over Boston. I could say that later in the day we learned the plane carrying the would-be shoe bomber was escorted into Logan Airport by two jet fighters out of Otis Air Force Base. The two we saw. I could say that a few days later, my silent, raging reply to an idiotic question at Logan went like this: “Yes, my bags have been in my possession the entire time, except when you dumb fucks leave them unattended at the security station while you ask me to step over here and take off my shoes.” Would this be a true war story? As O'Brien suggests in “How to Tell a True War Story,” would you feel cheated if it never happened? Without the grounding in reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen . a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. (89) I had to start with a story to show some of the influence this book has had on my writing. Reading this book set the form and called out my first direct treatment of our post-9/11 world. What I find most affecting and memorable about O'Brien's work, much more than the straight presentation of unimaginable brutality, is his deliberate and at times gleeful acknowledgement of the act of storytelling. He messes with the contract with the reader to suspend disbelief in ways that have me pondering his tales long after they would normally fade away. I'm going to explore that technique in this essay, as it seems to serve, among other things, to distance the reader (and writer) from impossible horrors while at the same time making them appear not only possible, but true. In telling a compelling narrative, a writer will slow the pace and build tension through a variety of mechanisms: character background, description of setting, introduction of sub-plot, summation of the plot so far. In several of the pieces in this collection, O'Brien uses commentary on the act of storytelling in this manner. Initially, he sets up a storyteller other than the first-person narrator, then he includes in the audience listeners other than just the reader. They often act as a Greek chorus that comments on the action. In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” Rat Kiley tells the story of a soldier who managed to get his high school sweetheart shipped to him in Vietnam. She was apple pie, Junior League material who transformed into a huntress and wound up with a wayward Special Forces band who pursued on-the-edge, out-law missions. She then disappeared into the jungle altogether. About two-thirds of the way into the story, the narrator intrudes to point out how Kiley interferes with his own story: Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said . That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. (116) Does this apparent triple dose of story form criticism (the writer, the narrator, and the story teller) break the spell? I don't think so. Rather it allows the writer to reinforce a somewhat unusual view—that a nice girl could indeed get “caught up in the Nam shit” (117)—while still building suspense. You want to know what happens next. It also introduces the most bizarre section of the tale by reminding the reader that, hey, this may be just a story, or it may be truer than you'd like to think. Distance and closeness. When you smell the rotting flesh and see the human tongues around Mary Anne's neck, you can remind yourself, this is just a story. But you know, as noted in the aside, the fierceness and brutality that women are capable of, so some part of you also thinks, God, this is true in some way, isn't it? O'Brien uses a meta-form of this technique in “Notes” and “Good Form” when he calls into question every story as it's told in this book. “Notes” reaches into the realm of actual occurrence. The author did write a book called Going After Cacciato, the story “Speaking of Courage” was published twice, the second time with revisions, and the description of the piece rings true. Furthermore, at the end of “Notes,” the narrator confesses to the failure of nerve that's attributed to another character in the previous story. He says “That part of the story is my own” (182). Yet two stories later, in “Good Form,” he claims that, besides age, occupation, and service as a soldier in Vietnam, “Almost everything else is invented” (203). Indeed, the copyright page tells us, between the edition number and the copyright, that, “This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary.” This implies that even the dedication is fictional. In the end, the reader is left with story-truth, as O'Brien calls it in
“Good Form” (203). Most of the stories succeed by that standard. The
one that falls short for me, “On the Rainy River,” exhibits little of
the urgency of spoken word rhythms, the vivid imagery, and even the
annihilating humor of the more successful pieces. In speaking about the
decision to go to war, the narrator says: I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history, everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents. I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure. (48) This passage follows O'Brien's characteristic repetition, but the ideas
presented are abstract—whole history, everything that mattered, the
law. “The Things They Carried” treats this subject with much more vivid
and visceral imagery: They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place.They died so as not to die of embarrassment (20-21). It doesn't matter that sentiments expressed in “On the Rainy River” may be close to the actual feelings of the author. I quote Mitch Sanders in “Sweetheart” when he says, “'Yeah, fine. But tell it right'” (117). Works Cited:
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