The Walking Dead

            While Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is considered a novel about the Vietnam War, its story most resonant in my mind is not one of battle, but of childhood love and loss. In the novel’s final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien inserts into his collection of war stories a seemingly random account of nine-year-old Timmy's infatuation with a classmate named Linda, who died of cancer just months after their innocent love sparked. Ostensibly unrelated, this story serves to emphasize the purpose of O’Brien’s metatextual commentary – to comment on the act of storytelling and the necessity of manipulation to truly tell a story in the most dynamic way – more effectively, in my opinion, than any of the novel’s individual war stories. At the time of his writing of this story, Linda was long deceased – but in this chapter, O’Brien suggests that in act of writing, he can bring her back to life: “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” (224). The purpose of this chapter, it seems, is to settle the truth-versus-lies debate that permeates the entire novel once and for all. In implying that the purpose of storytelling is to bring life to the lifeless, O’Brien refutes the notion that truth has any importance. He himself admits that he has manipulated his anecdote to represent the image of Linda in his memory, not the image of Linda in reality, but this illusory manipulation creates, he claims, an even more vivid image of aliveness: “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 your head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (218). Evidently, this ostensibly unrelated anecdote of bringing his dead childhood love back to life turns out to be crucial in summing up a main point of contest in the entire novel – the purpose of storytelling and the necessity of lies within it – abundantly clear: if a story’s true power is to bring a three-dimensional sense of life through two-dimensional words on a page, a certain level of manipulation is not merely welcome, but required.