Michelle Lara

December 10, 2019

English IV

O’Brien’s Way

There are so many authors in the world that write romance novels, fiction novels, or sci-fi novels.
But the thing about all these books is that they were created differently than other books by different
authors, from foreshadowing events to objects having symbolism. But what does O’Brien do that makes
his book, The Things They Carried, different? Is it his use of language or the use of symbolism? Well,
that is something I want to know as well!

Anything can happen to certain characters from getting a happy ending or no happy ending.
Ouch! But if you look at O’Brien’s way, he goes from recalling moments to hiding it. Like Rat who lost
Lemon from playing with a smoke grenade and steps on a trip mine. Yeah, I know, who plays with
something dangerous!

After Lemon’s death, Rat was in complete distress. He had “shot away” at the baby buffalo and
“shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt” (pg 79). Rat was struggling
mentally and physically and dealt with this pain on a baby buffalo because of a death he and the narrator
saw with their own eyes.

O’Brien hides the truth of the story by telling it a different way. He states “In a true war story, if
there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the
meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning” (pg. 77). Rather than talking about the gruesome details
of Lemon’s death, he distorts it to something else, a love story. Deep! Like Mitchell Sanders where he
told the narrator the time when soldiers heard music and opera.

For that reason, they pursued an airstrike leaving it as a dead zone. But Sanders admits that he
“had to make up a few things” (pg. 77) and for what, to hide the truth. The narrator states “War is hell, but
that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery
and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love” (pg. 80). O’Brien had to hide the truth of the war
story that the soldiers did hear things. He was revealing the effects that the war had on people, like
soldiers acting out of instinct to strike a city or Rat killing an animal out of anger. No one would ever do
something like that unless something is driving them to do it.

All in all, no book will give you the answer right away and it’s never easy to find. Heck, even
writing this was hard but in the end, I found O’Brien’s way. All the moments that O’Brien mentioned was
to show how hard it is to tell a war story because memories that the war brings and hurts to tell. O’Brien’s
way was to express how war made people suffer.

O’Brien, Tim. Things They Carried. Fourth Estate LTD, 2019.