The Things They Carried: Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Physical and Emotional Burdens

The “[t]hings” of the title that O’Brien’s characters carry are both literal and figurative. While they all carry heavy physical loads, they also all carry heavy emotional loads, composed of grief, terror, love, and longing. Each man’s physical burden underscores his emotional burden. Henry Dobbins, for example, carries his girlfriend’s pantyhose and, with them, the longing for love and comfort. Similarly, Jimmy Cross carries compasses and maps and, with them, the responsibility for the men in his charge. Faced with the heavy burden of fear, the men also carry the weight of their reputations. Although every member of the Alpha Company experiences fear at some point, showing fear will only reveal vulnerability to both the enemy and sometimes cruel fellow soldiers.

After the war, the psychological burdens the men carry during the war continue to define them. Those who survive carry guilt, grief, and confusion, and many of the stories in the collection are about these survivors’ attempts to come to terms with their experience. In “Love,” for example, Jimmy Cross confides in O’Brien that he has never forgiven himself for Ted Lavender’s death. Norman Bowker’s grief and confusion are so strong that they prompt him to drive aimlessly around his hometown lake in “Speaking of Courage,” to write O’Brien a seventeen-page letter explaining how he never felt right after the war in “Notes,” and to hang himself in a YMCA. While Bowker bears his psychological burdens alone, O’Brien shares the things he carries, his war stories, with us. His collection of stories asks us to help carry the burden of the Vietnam War as part of our collective past.

Fear of Shame as Motivation

O’Brien’s personal experience shows that the fear of being shamed before one’s peers is a powerful motivating factor in war. His story “On the Rainy River” explains his moral quandary after receiving his draft notice—he does not want to fight in a war he believes is unjust, but he does not want to be thought a coward. What keeps O’Brien from fleeing into Canada is not patriotism or dedication to his country’s cause—the traditional motivating factors for fighting in a war—but concern over what his family and community will think of him if he doesn’t fight. This experience is emblematic of the conflict, explored throughout The Things They Carried, between the misguided expectations of a group of people important to a character and that character’s uncertainty regarding a proper course of action.

Fear of shame not only motivates reluctant men to go to Vietnam but also affects soldiers’ relationships with each other once there. Concern about social acceptance, which might seem in the abstract an unimportant preoccupation given the immediacy of death and necessity of group unity during war, leads O’Brien’s characters to engage in absurd or dangerous actions. For example, Curt Lemon decides to have a perfectly good tooth pulled (in “The Dentist”) to ease his shame about having fainted during an earlier encounter with the dentist. The stress of the war, the strangeness of Vietnam, and the youth of the soldiers combine to create psychological dangers that intensify the inherent risks of fighting. Jimmy Cross, who has gone to war only because his friends have, becomes a confused and uncertain leader who endangers the lives of his soldiers. O’Brien uses these characters to show that fear of shame is a misguided but unavoidable motivation for going to war.

The Subjection of Truth to Storytelling

By giving the narrator his own name and naming the rest of his characters after the men he actually fought alongside in the Vietnam War, O’Brien blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. The result is that it is impossible to know whether or not any given event in the stories truly happened to O’Brien. He intentionally heightens this impossibility when his characters contradict themselves several times in the collection of stories, rendering the truth of any statement suspect. O’Brien’s aim in blending fact and fiction is to make the point that objective truth of a war story is less relevant than the act of telling a story. O’Brien is attempting not to write a history of the Vietnam War through his stories but rather to explore the ways that speaking about war experience establishes or fails to establish bonds between a soldier and his audience. The technical facts surrounding any individual event are less important than the overarching, subjective truth of what the war meant to soldiers and how it changed them.

The different storytellers in The Things They Carried—Rat Kiley and Mitchell Sanders especially, in addition to O’Brien—work to lay out war’s ugly truths, which are so profound that they require neither facts nor long explanations. Such statements as “This is true,” which opens “How to Tell a True War Story,” do not establish that the events recounted in the story actually occurred. Rather, they indicate that the stylistic and thematic content of the story is true to the experience that the soldiers had in the war. This truth is often ugly, in contrast to the ideas of glory and heroism associated with war before Vietnam. In O’Brien’s “true” war story, Kiley writes to Lemon’s sister, and when she never responds, he calls her a “dumb cooze,” only adding to the ugliness of the story. O’Brien’s declaration that the truest part of this story is that it contains no moral underscores the idea that the purpose of stories is to relate the truth of experience, not to manufacture false emotions in their audiences.

The Power of Friendship

In a grim and violent book, one gentler theme is the importance of friendship in life. The men of the platoon bicker and tease each other, but more often provide support and understanding in a way no one else can. When the character of Tim struggles to understand how he came to commit murder in “The Man I Killed,” Kiowa gently guides him through his despair, saying, “You feel terrible, I know that.” After the war is over, characters still provide friendship and understanding to each other, as when Lt. Cross tells Tim to write about them, or when Norman writes Tim a long letter about his work. Tim’s friendship with his daughter, who tries to understand what he’s been through, is another reinforcement of this theme.

The Pointlessness of War

The characters of the platoon are repeatedly shown to have no real understanding of why they’re being sent on any particular mission, nor how their actions fundamentally change the conflict in which they’re embroiled. Lt. Cross calls in air support after a member of the platoon dies, and a village is heavily bombed. Tim kills a man who posed no real threat to him. Mary Anne is corrupted by the war, becomes a killer, and disappears into the jungle. There’s never any point or result to these actions. The war grinds on, and the men either survive or are ground up with it. They never speak of the rationale for the war, and when one of the men shoots his own foot to get sent home, they do not judge him because they know the war is pointless.

Death’s Power

In “The Lives of the Dead,” Tim remembers having to collect the bodies of 27 enemy combatants, after which his friend Mitchell tells him, “Death sucks.” Over and over in the stories, the horror of death – its inevitability, violence and unexpectedness – is depicted, particularly in the violent ways Ted Lavender, Dave Jensen and Kiowa die. Yet O’Brien concludes the book with his realization that remembering the dead by telling their stories allows them to very briefly be alive once more. Writing about people who have died, the book implies, is the only way to conquer death.

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