Two O'Briens, Multiple Stories, One Reason

“By telling stories, you objectify your own experiences . . . You pin down certain truths. You make up others.” Tim O’Brien approaches his novel The Things They Carried in an indirect way that may spark confusion in a first-time reader. Indeed, naming the narrator after himself is only the first perplexing detail. While this fact seems to signify a memoir, the novel is actually fiction. For O’Brien, actual events alone cannot express the emotional baggage that plagues soldiers in war. Therefore, he uses fictional stories to better relay the traumatic emotions he experienced.
The chapter “Speaking of Courage” tells a story of guilt over a close friend’s death. The platoon is stranded in a flooded field of human waste, where the stench is overpowering. Kiowa, one of the soldiers, is wounded and slips beneath the waters. Norman Bowker attempts to save him, but “it [the stench] was inside him, in his lungs,” and in a moment of weakness, he releases Kiowa’s boot. However, in a later chapter O’Brien states “Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up . . . That part of the story is my own.” This statement immediately strikes a contradiction. The story explicitly states that Norman gave up the fight with the river, so how can O’Brien’s comment be true? The story is a tactic used to express the guilt Norman felt over his friend’s death. Norman never let go of the boot, yet he was present and unable to save his friend. Thus, he still experiences the same guilt as though he had allowed the river to wash Kiowa away.
However, this is only the first step to understanding O’Brien’s intricate web. Because the novel is fiction, Norman Bowker does not exist, and neither does Kiowa. Yet O’Brien still declares it a true story. In every anecdote, O’Brien ascribes his feelings onto the fictional characters involved. Each character represents an emotion or event that he experienced during the war. The actual events of his life and the attached emotions make up an overwhelming clot of grief. But by writing stories about these individual emotions, he is able to put a face on his unruly emotions, thus allowing him to relive and come to terms with the traumatic experiences. In order to do this, he must also invent a second self—the narrator Tim O’Brien. This way, he can look on as an outsider, while still viewing the experience through his own eyes.
The novel is thus a psychological account as well as a collection of expert storytelling. It shows the tortured emotions of a man scared by war while also triggering an emotional response from the reader. With the powerful force of storytelling, O’Brien is able to recreate emotions and deliver them through words.