The ending of The Things They Carried for me, went into a completely unexpected direction. I did not expect that O'Brien (the narrator of most of the book) would talk about his childhood romance. The story immediately switched from talking about his comrades to talking about a girl he loved when he was 9 years old. However, despite the change, the two stories actually correlated very well. I think what O'Brien was trying to do was explain the purpose of a story within a story within another story. In other words, he explained the significance of the creation of a story using the story of Linda which was in the whole story of his experience in Vietnam. I think with the final chapter, O'Brien the author wanted to illustrate through O'Brien the narrator and his stories that there is a reason for telling a story despite the lies within that story.
A quote that stuck out to me was "We kept the dead alive with stories"(226). Although this is a piece of fiction, it is still a story that carries a lot of truth in it about the living. The characters may be imaginary but they keep the dead soldiers as well as the veterans of the Vietnam war alive. These imaginary characters served as new bodies for the real souls to inhabit and to keep the souls alive. Therefore, when O'Brien the narrator says that he'll never die, I think it is bringing in O'Brien the author into the story. O'Brien the narrator knows he is part of a story and that is why he will continue living with the soul of a Vietnam War Soldier and maybe more specifically with O'Brien the author's soul. He can never die because he doesn't really exist in real life, only in the book. As a character, a writer in the story, he keeps O'Brien the author of The Things They Carried alive.
Thank you Anna for your post. Your main argument helps me significantly in understanding the ending of this particular story, as well as its placement within the structure of this collection of short stories. There’s great validity to the subargument that the ending made it evident that O’Brien the author tells stories about O’Brien the narrator to keep the latter alive despite the lies O’Brien (either one of them) have shown us. But I would argue that lies bear great utility in helping O’Brien reconstruct a piece of him, through which he seeks to preserve his prewar innocence, or Timmy. This is precisely because his stories are composite of incoherent fragments of memories that he needs the lies to glue them together, to add in emotional gravity and keep it somewhat grounded amidst all the surrealism that inevitably come along with his reliance on the disjointed remembrance of war.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to your last sentence, based on the class discussion on Wednesday, it is clear that O’Brien the narrator needs O’Brien the author just as much as the latter needs the former in order to be alive (the former can live as long as the latter keeps writing about him, specifically the “him” of war). Having said that, I would further argue that such dynamic tension isn’t exactly equal; that is, it is only O’Brien the author, who has the power over the temporal and spatial domain of his own construct, that can spiral past the stories of war to get away from war and back to Timmy, i.e. his prewar innocence (hence ending this body of text with Timmy). In other words, although both O’Briens keep on living, only the author can actually achieve preservation of his original self and, ultimately, self-salvation, while O’Briens the narrator can only remember and relish his prewar innocence - a futile attempt due to the temporal and spatial constraint of his being. And the moment we put down the book and forget about him (and even when others pick up and read about him again and again), O’Brien the narrator will never get to where he needs to be.
Looking at it this way, I would also argue that O’Brien the author, through the actual act of writing and editing this book - and the finishing thereof, seems to proclaim that he himself has moved beyond the haunting constraint of war, back to his prewar roots, and spiral forward. Leaving a part of him stuck in this never-ending loop and using such phenomenon as a leverage to salvage his life seems too cruel a joke, not just “anti-climactic” as Professor Schwartz has remarked. But then again, O’Brien used to be a soldier, so perhaps for him, forever taunting/torturing a fictional version of himself isn’t that traumatizing (Yes I’m implying that he may have more times than not hurt and even kill people).