Keep the Dead Alive, Tell Your Story

If you ever find yourself telling someone, or a group of someone’s, a story, and suddenly you’re on a downward slope, running out of excitement to build up, you should never be afraid to add a few details. As human beings, we tend to add a little extra to our stories when they start to fade out like the dying wick of a candle. Tim O’Brien uses this technique, “story truth” he calls it. It’s the difference between story truth and happening truth that determines whether the audience presented with the story is going to hear it or truly listen to it. His novel, The Things They Carried, is a rhetorically and stylistically intricate plot to keep you up at night thinking about the fine line between what is true and untrue. More specifically, O’Brien uses three main themes to shape that aspect of the story, the weight of the war for the men of the Alpha Company, the art of the love story instead of a war story, and how guilt shapes a person, especially in ‘Nam.

There’s a famous saying out there, for pretty much everything in life, that you don’t really know what a situation, scenario, or snapshot in life was truly like unless you were there in person, the raw heat of the moment. It’s that “you had to have been there” mentality that we all get lost in. However, as Tim O’Brien sits down to write about the war, what he desperately wants us all to feel is that there is so much more to his stories than first meets the eye. Its text on a page to us, a war-story, something that someone else wrote to share with us for some valuable English teacher, geek-out lesson in class. However, to Tim O’Brien, it’s so much more. It is a love story. He see’s it this way because he lived it. He was drafted and had the choice to fight or fly. In his story “On the Rainy River”, he depicts this choice through a character named Elroy Berdahl. Elroy, the owner of Tip Top Lodge, the major turning point for Tim’s choice of fate, uses his knowledge of Tim’s fear of embarrassment to convince him that nearly fleeing the country would have caused him more emotional pain and suffering than the war. He then moves on to become engulfed in the war, in the people who he fought with and for everyday. For
Kiowa, it was a love story.

The first chapter of the novel covers the literal things the men in the company have to carry. However, through his passion for literary device, O’Brien is able to convey that the men carry an immense weight and pressure of intangible things as well. O’Brien subtly demonstrates this to the reader in saying, “he carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men”, referring to Jimmy Cross’s intangible and tangible things to carry. Sure, each soldier is there own character, and O’Brien spends the story, in depth describing each man of the platoon and their quirky necessities. However, the story truth aspect of what he describes is the intangible weight that each soldier must also carry.

Similar to the intangible weight that each soldier carries is the guilt that each one of them often faces. The war is often described through O’Brien’s eyes as a game of luck and chance. It is circumstantial all the time, like Curt Lemon and the grenade, or Kiowa in the shit field. Each soldier interchan
geable for the next, chance, and the inconvenience of being the wrong guy and at the wrong time. This aspect brings guilt into the novel. As each “wrong guy” is removed from the story, whether story truth or happening truth, many of the others face an incredibly heavy amount of guilt and shame. It is in those moments, where the stories come about, the overwhelming sensation of shame behind the soldier’s eyes. How they act out upon their own embarrassment and inability to take back their actions. How they think in depth that they could have saved him, should have killed the enemy first, would have been there for him, but wasn’t. It’s guilt that shapes each character in Tim’s mind as he describes them through all forms of storytelling realities.

As these three themes intertwine, we start to develop in our own minds, how Tim O’Brien went about writing his life story. He informs us that through his writing he is able to hold on forever, keep the dead alive, and shape what the reality was of being an American soldier of the Alpha Company in ‘Nam.