Jeremy Robertson Dr.

Arnold Intl 3111 17 January 2014 Microtheme I Tim OBriens The Things They Carried paints a dynamic contrast of lives at war and their counterparts during the Vietnam War era. The name of the story alone immediately has you envisioning the physical things they carried with them every day and night for their part in the guerilla warfare of their time. OBrien elaborately describes the weapons, food, gadgets etc on multiple occasions throughout the story, giving life to the title. He breaks at a few parts throughout the story to make some seemingly lengthy lists of things they carried. With this I noticed a binary opposite: storytelling vs. realism. The story flows along following mainly Lt. Cross attempting to lead his platoon while daydreaming and lusting for a girl back home, perplexing his duty as a leader and giving the story as a whole just that, a story. However, the story will stop at points and jump out of storytelling mode and give realism to the things they carried, not only in the story but in reallife Vietnam. The way OBrien so elaborately describes the things they carry pulls you out of Lt. Cross ever building climax of uncertainty and realistically sits you in front of a whole other stage. It brings about a gloomy realness of imagining what is was like in real life to have carried these items out of necessity for survival: the carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive, followed by an entire paragraph

describing only the weapons they carry to really bring home a realistic scariness of the Vietnam era. With this, I believe OBrien is definitely successful at giving insight into an unfathomable experience of war though storytelling.