Tracy Apple, 8

Final Project
Artists Statement: The Things We Carry
The Things They Carried is a collection of short stories by Tim
O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War.
Instead of presenting a coherent, linear story about his experiences in
Vietnam, the author describes interconnected eventshalf truth, half
fictionin order to explore the meaning of the war. For my artistic
representation of OBriens work, I chose to focus on what I saw to be
the main theme of the book: the weight of the intangible. The first
chapter of the book is the source of the texts title: The Things They
Carried. In it, the author describes the people in his platoon in terms of
the physical and emotional things they carry. For example, on the
opening page, OBrien tells us that Henry Dobbins, who was a big
man, carried extra rations, and that he was especially fond of canned
peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake (1). This quote illustrates
the burden of the physical weight of the things Henry Dobbins carries,
emphasized by the words heavy syrup and pound cake. On the
other hand, we learn about the people themselves through some of
OBriens descriptions of the things they carried. For example, in
addition to carrying an illustrated New Testament that had been
presented to him by his father, Kiowa, a man of color, carried his
grandmothers distrust of the white man (3). This quotes shows us
that Kiowa carries history with him, as the past oppression and
mistreatment of his people still affects him. Both of these passages
tell us that the soldiers are weighed down not only by physical objects,
but by invisible things, like distrust.
My art represents what the soldiers might have carried during
the war: a journal, a letter, a memory. The book form of my piece
represents a journal, and I used a small projector slide that I found in a
junk drawer to embed in the front cover. It reads: When the raging
jaws of hell drive me to seek salvation The raging jaws of hell are
the Vietnam war (war is Hell,) and the salvation is found in the
stories within. In other words, this shows that the we often turn to the
intangible things we carry for comfort. The first page of the journal is
an envelope, inside which I wrote a list of the things that I carry. They
are both tangible and intangible, and mirror the theme of OBriens
work, mimicking the things that the soldiers carried in the first story.
The second page is another envelope. This letter represents the
letters from home that many of the soldiers carried on their persons.
On the outside of the envelope, I put stamps from Czechoslovakia.
Because my family is from there, this represents that I carry my family,
and my history. It is in my genes, and in the stories I carry with me

that were passed down from the memories of my parents and

grandparents. Inside this envelope is a postcard with a picture of a
kitchen, which illustrates the fact that we dont carry material objects
because we are attached to them; we are attached to the intangible
things they represent, like the memory of home.
The next page represents the letters that the soldiers may have
written to their loved ones back home. The man on the forefront of the
letter has an X over his mouth to show that these soldiers often
couldnt talk about the horrors they lived through. They were
burdened by the weight of their experiences. This idea is reinforced on
the following two pages. On these, I made a collage of the body that is
gruesomely described body in the short story The Man I Killed. In it,
OBrien describes a man hes killed with a grenade, describing his face
as red, with a yellow star where the eye had been. His description is of
the Vietnamese flag; OBrien is not describing the dead mans face, he
is describing the dead in terms of the whole experience of Vietnam.
However, he cannot talk about ithe is crippled by the burden of his
entire experience. To show this, I made a poem out of the passage:
Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is
nothing left to remember except the story. Talk, he said (132). Here,
OBriens memories are the stories, which he has told in the book. He
has used his work of fiction to unload some of the burdens of war. This
poem is set against the backdrop of a calendar to show that stories
stay with us. They stretch across time, burdening those who
experienced them, and living on through the ritual of storytelling as we
pass these experiences down from generation to generation.