The Use of Achronological Narrative

We have spoken at length about perception and truthfulness within The Things They Carried, but there is one particular device used by Tim O'Brien (Author and character) which interests me most in this particular discussion, one which we have only glossed over. As I read, I am noticing a greater and greater emphasis on achronological narrative. This isn't simply a matter of taking individual short stories and placing them in an unusual order; O'Brien is constantly giving us references to stories he hasn't told us yet or has told us several times previously, attaching each story to others within the novel. We can see how this adds to the tangled mesh of perception and how it captures the blurred and uncertain picture of war that O'Brien (the character) is trying to pin down into words. However, the oddly structured narrative may be doing more than that. As the book as progressed thus far, O'Brien's chronological leaps have gotten more and more extreme; he jumps from the anecdote about Mary Anne Bell to the scene of a peaceful church, to the very close description and fantasy about the man he killed, then an aside concerning his life after the war. What can we make of these narrative steps? First of all, it sets up a metatextual sense of tension. We are left without a way to easily navigate from one narrative instance to the next, and so must be on guard to watch for changes in the scene, changes in description, and particularly changes in tone. The chapter “The Man I Killed” is written very differently than “Style”, or even “Speaking of Courage”. As such we must be ready to read into each section of the text more carefully, to decipher why exactly O'Brien, either as a character or an author, is writing the way he is.

Perhaps more importantly, the unique narrative also serves as a defining point of Tim O'Brien the character. As stories fade in and out, and as the tone grows or fades in intensity, we ought to follow the contours of O'Brien's memory. The chapter “The Man I Killed” contains almost no regular narrative at all, only description half-mixed with fantasy about the potential pasts of the man who O'Brien has killed. In contrast, the very next chapter is almost entirely narrative, explaining the events that led up to the previous chapter. Why would the character O'Brien choose to write in such a way? I do not know the answer myself, but the potential explanations serve as valuable insight into a character that is very rarely depicted within the narrative itself. Perhaps he has realized that he has lost control of the narrative in preference to his memories, and he is attempting to compensate. Perhaps he is trying to make the point that, for him, the raw sensation of looking at the man he has killed supersedes any explanation for it.