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.
