20. Theme

The Things They Carried seemed to have a theme centered on the emotional states of the soldiers during the Vietnam War and trying to deal with them afterwards. The book begins talking about the literal objects the soldiers carried with them from fort to fort, but as the story continues we also are informed of "the things they carried" emotionally and how exactly they coped with them, or in some cases, how they failed to cope with them. The main feeling I picked up on was guilt of the deaths of others. Dealing with such burdens was not an easy task for any of the men in Vietnam. O'Brien dealt with such negative burdens through his writing. He not only writes to deal with the war, but in the end he also wrote about Linda to continue dealing with a traumatic childhood experience. The book concludes with the following, "I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story," (233). I found this to be a beautiful yet disconsolate statement. It is beautiful in that O'Brien can cope with such tragedy so well through his stories and writing and imagination. But I find it sad that he has to do so in order to protect himself from such pain. He has endured much tragedy and things that no one could ever understand unless they had experienced it themselves. Now that I have completed this book, I cannot decide how I feel about it. I cannot say I liked it, but I cannot say that I did not like it either. I did not necessarily enjoy reading it, but now that it is done, I know I really enjoyed some of the statements from O'Brien throughout the novel. What I do know for sure is that I definitely liked this book better than The Sun Also Rises.