Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Storytelling
O’Brien believes that stories contain immense power, since
they allow tellers and listeners to confront the past together and
share otherwise unknowable experiences. Telling stories returns
to the foreground of the narrative again and again. Mitchell Sanders,
the Alpha Company’s resident storyteller, whose anecdotes range
from the mythic (the story of six men who hear voices in the jungle)
to the specific (the story of how Rat Kiley shoots himself in the
foot and as a result is allowed to leave Vietnam), contends that
truth and morality in a war story have little to do with accuracy.
For example, after telling the story of the men who hear voices
in the jungle, Sanders admits that he made up a few things in order
to get his point across. Nevertheless, his story has resonance.
The added details are only further proof of the universal truth:
the eerie quiet of the jungle causes soldiers’ imaginations to run
wild with fantastic images far stranger than anything they might
actually encounter.
O’Brien shows that storytelling is not just a coping mechanism for
soldiers who are embroiled in the war but also a strategy for communication
throughout life. Several of the stories in The Things They
Carried are told from O’Brien’s point of view, twenty years after
the war. With this distance, facts have become cloudy and all that
remains of the experience are the lingering feelings and memories.
He is aware of his omissions and exaggeration of detail, and in the
case of “Good Form,” he even suggests that all of his previous stories
are made up. Even if he did not actually kill a soldier in My Khe,
the truth of his feelings about war is no less valid. His insistence on
the idea that stories can make the past become part of the present shows
that his priority is not on the facts but on our identification with
his feelings.
Ambiguous Morality
O’Brien’s stories show that the jungle blurs boundaries
between right and wrong. The brutal killing of innocents on both
sides cannot be explained, and in some moments of disbelief, the
men deal with the pain of their feelings by pointing out the irony.
“There’s a moral here,” Mitchell Sanders ironically points out again
and again, each time stressing the actual immorality of the specific
situation. After Ted Lavender is fatally shot by the enemy, for
example, Sanders jokes that the “moral” of Ted Lavender’s accidental
and tragic death is to stay away from drugs.
Exposed to these horrors, the men’s notions of right and
wrong shift and bend. After Ted Lavender’s death, for example, Cross evens
the score and deals with his own guilt by burning the entire village
of Than Khe. Similarly, Rat Kiley deals with his frustration about
Curt Lemon’s death by brutally killing a water buffalo. Affected
by the senselessness of war, even O’Brien—a college educated, peace-loving
man—feels himself grow hard and callous, willing to wish others
harm. Ironically, the moral or lesson in The Things They
Carried is that there is no morality in war. War is ambiguous
and arbitrary because it forces humans into extreme situations that
have no obvious solutions.
Loneliness and Isolation
O’Brien argues that in Vietnam, loneliness and isolation
are forces as destructive as any piece of ammunition. In repeatedly
emphasizing the impact of solitude on the soldiers, he shows that
thoughts, worries, and fears are as dangerous—if not more dangerous—than the
Vietnamese soldiers themselves. In “How to Tell a True War Story,”
Mitchell Sanders’s story concerning soldiers made so paranoid by
their experience on listening patrol that they hear strange noises
emphasizes how the imagination can take over instantly in the lonely
silence. In “The Ghost Soldiers,” O’Brien takes unfair advantage
of the power of isolation when he attempts to frighten Bobby Jorgenson
while Jorgenson is on night guard duty. In order to emphasize the
evil intentions of his revenge plot, O’Brien reflects on his fear
of being cut off from the outside world and the close relation between
night guard and childhood fears of the dark. In Vietnam, isolation
is synonymous with endless time to dwell on the unknown.
Loneliness remains a strong presence enveloping the soldiers long
after the war is over. Jimmy Cross, for example, feels bereft after
the war because his hope for happiness in Martha is dashed by her
rejection. Norman Bowker also feels empty and isolated after the
war. In “Speaking of Courage,” he aimlessly drives around a lake
in his hometown, thinking that he has no one to talk to. He even attempts
to converse with an A&W employee, but no one will offer him
consolation. O’Brien himself realizes that if he didn’t have writing
to work through his trauma, he might be in as abject a place as Bowker.
The character O’Brien’s narration—and, in effect, the author O’Brien’s The
Things They Carried—is an attempt to combat the destructive
isolation that the Vietnam experience fostered.
