Living the Night Life

"That was the phrase everyone used: the night life. A language trick. It made things seem tolerable" (208).

The previous quote was used to summarize how the men in the platoon felt while in Japan, however it also serves a broader meaning and address an overarching theme in The Things They Carried. O'Brien uses language to engage and inform the readers of the war in Vietnam, because language is essentially the only thing he has left. We see throughout the novel that O'Brien and his platoon mates lose everything in the war. The lose friends, loved ones, limbs, belongings, hope, and innocence. They lose tangibles and intangibles. They lose the ability to forget about the war because it is so engrained into their memory and their being. They lose themselves.

Language is the only instrument O'Brien has left after the war to make things "tolerable." He becomes a writer for this very reason. But O'Brien does not simply use language to describe to us his experience in Vietnam. He admits to us that he is a forty-three year old writer and once was a foot soldier in Quang Ngai Province. He follows his "truth" by confessing to us that "almost everything else is invented." (171). Thus, he reveals to use that The Things They Carried is nothing but a "language trick."As readers, this is appalling because we come to feel so much for and relate to the characters in the novel. We become invested in the story because O'Brien makes us feel that way.

Later on, O'Brien tries to explain to us once again why he wrote The Things They Carried. "The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head" (218). We feel "the illusion of aliveness" (218) as we read. First we feel it, then it is ripped away from us, then finally we feel it again. The purpose of O'Brien's writing is to make us feel the things he felt and dream along with him, so that we can understand, or at least try, the things he himself cannot seem to grasp. Maybe, his hopes were that our understanding may better help him understand why he lost so much in Vietnam. Or maybe he knows we are unable to understand, and is simply writing to keep the "spirits," of those who were lost in the war, alive.