Although Tim states within The Things They Carried that he’s “trying to save Timmy’s life with a story”, throughout the novel he suggests this is impossible. As he talks about the meaning of war he says things like, “you can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead” (O’Brien 39). The idea that the dead can’t be saved or brought back to life also arises on his date with Linda as he says about the body in The Man Who Never Was, “even then I kept seeing the soldier’s body tumbling toward the water, splashing down hard, how inert and heavy it was, how completely dead” (O’Brien 220). Even as Tim strives to bring back the dead, he’s aware that it’s impossible. Perhaps here The Man Who Never Was becomes even more important. The movie, like the beginning of the novel, centers around that which the soldier carries and the conclusions drawn from it, but perhaps even more importantly- all of the conclusions drawn from the body are false. As the Nazi soldiers try and derive meaning from the dead man and discover who he was, effectively trying to bring him back to life in the same way Tim tries to bring the soldiers, Linda, and even his younger self back to life, they can’t do it. They’re wrong about who the soldier was. Perhaps this can also be applied to Tim and his own conceptions of his younger self as well as his friends. Although he says about Linda, “in a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story miracles can happen” (O’Brien 224), he is never able to bring Linda back, his imagined relationship with her is never what it was when she was alive, her existence dependent on his imperfect perception and memory, memory which is transformed and revised as time passes, changing in the same way as Rat Kiley’s stories. Although Tim may strive to bring Timmy back to life through writing, he can’t… and he’s aware he can’t. The truth he tells is imperfect, or perhaps even false, as are his memories of that which is gone. As he writes and rewrites his history he’s chasing something he can never catch.
(I wrote about the fallibility of memory and perception within Cat’s Cradle in my first blog post)
Although I agree with much of your argument in this post, I disagree with your analysis of why Tim writes these stories. You acknowledge that he “strives to bring the dead back” even though “he is aware that it’s impossible”. However, I don’t think that he is, at any point, trying to bring them back to life, rather, he is telling these stories as a way of coping with their deaths. These many stories are Tim’s way of showing his love for each individual. He “writes and rewrites” because he hasn’t yet found a way to honor their memory the way he hopes to.
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