The Power of Stories

            The ending of The Things They Carried ties together quite nicely a metaphor of the importance of stories. Stories have the ability to make “the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.” O’Brien uses his stories to bring everyone he lost back to life. For the time it takes to read the story, the characters are as vivacious and full of life as ever, even if it’s just in our imaginations. The metaphor fully comes together when Linda says being dead is “like being inside a book that nobody’s reading” and “all you can do is…just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.” In this passage the dead literally live in books, driving home O’Brien’s point that writing is the way to keep them alive.

            O’Brien ties all of his metafictional elements together at the end like this not through another account of a friend lost in war, but through Timmy’s first love, an innocent nine year old girl. Strange, it seems, that more than 200 pages focused around the war culminates with something so far removed from it. But this is not a story about the war at all. As O’Brien tells us early on, “a true war story is never about the war.” Naturally this holds true for his own works. A war story on the surface, The Things They Carried is actually a narrative about many, many other things – guilt, love, friendship, death, fear, courage – but above all it’s about stories. Metafiction at its very finest.