The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien | In-Depth Summary & Analysis

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried explained with summaries in just a few minutes!

Course Hero Literature Instructor Russell Jaffe provides an in-depth analysis of the plot, characters, symbols, and themes of Tim O'Brien's short story collection The Things They Carried.

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Tim O'Brien's short story collection The Things They Carried uses the stories of individual soldiers to humanize the large-scale tragedy of the Vietnam War.

The Things They Carried opens by listing the gear and necessities carried by a group of soldiers in the Vietnam War, but the ultimate emphasis is on emotional burdens.

Young American men are thrust into a foreign conflict and carry with them reminders of their homes and means of coping with the violence of their experience: drugs, letters, and religious tokens among them.

They navigate distant romantic relationships, profound guilt over the deaths of both their compatriots and enemy soldiers, and interpersonal relationships, all under extreme duress.

The stories eloquently depict the pressures of combat, with nobility and camaraderie existing alongside failure and vengeance. There are no easy answers in war and the characters in this collection must strive to find meaning in a context that makes that nearly impossible.

American writer Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried was first published in 1990, 20 years after he was drafted into the Vietnam War. The vividness of his experiences shaped his stories, in which he appears as a character and narrator.

The short stories in The Things They Carried contains many powerful motifs, including guilt as the oppressive, lifelong weight of guilt haunts O’Brien’s stories; lost innocence, as the brutal, abrupt disillusionment of war is described as one of its worst tragedies; love, as O’Brien explores the many faces of love in war; and storytelling, as the stories reflect on the power of storytelling to preserve memories, offer solace for introspection, and to allow one to cope with trauma and learn to forgive.

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