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The Things They Carried
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The Things They Carried (1990) (edit title/settings)

by Tim O'Brien (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of... read more

Summary edit see section history

"The things they carried" starts out telling a story of a man named Jimmy Cross and how he is in love with a women named Martha. During the Vietnam/American war a man named Tim O'Brien is drafted into the war even though he does not have a care world for war or politics. The book first starts... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

"The things they carried" starts out telling a story of a man named Jimmy Cross and how he is in love with a women named Martha. During the Vietnam/American war a man named Tim O'Brien is drafted into the war even though he does not have a care world for war or politics. The book first starts out listing a lot of the things that soldiers carry during war. Guns, comic books, pictures, and panchos are the items most comonly carried along. Tim soon goes on to tell stories of "humping" through jungles, up mountains, and even through days of rain while being constantly distracted by the thoughts of death. Tim tells many stories about being picked the odd one out to crawl into dark tunnels, crude jokes about death and the dark to cover up true feelings, and after the war, visiting with old friends and how through story telling, truth gets lost. The first long story Tim tells is of a time in his life, before the war, when he wanted to escape to Canada, where he would no longer be accountable to go to war. Through telling some of these stories, Tim teaches about how truth gets lost through good story teling and how sometimes its better that way. Death is mentioned a lot, the death of friends and the death of dreams. Another long story tells about a man who brought in his girlfriend to come live with him at his camp base during the war. War changes this woman so much that she runs off into the jungle, never to be seen again. One of the last stories in the book is of how Tim was shot and the surgeon in this group of men was to trimmed to help Tim during a battle at first which resulted in Tim not being able to come back to battle duty. Tim got back at this Sergent and they were then even. The book ends with Tim recalling a girl he was once in love with and how even at the age of forty three he still dreams of her and how he has changed becasue of war. (emily)

Characters/People edit see section history

  • Tim O'Brien: Tim is the narrator of this book. Though they share the same name, the author and the narrator are separate. Tim (the narrator) tells the story through first person view. He tells the truth even when he is lying.
  • Norman Bowker: Carried a diary, Enjoyed Silence and had some quarrels with Kiowa. Would play Checkers at night with Henry Dobbins, silently.
  • Mitchell Sanders: had a big impact on O'Brien. He was a great leader and a likable guy.
  • Bobby Jorgenson: New medic
  • Henry Dobbins: Played Checkers with Norman and carried his girlfriends pantyhose around his neck for comfort and protection."In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like the country, too, Dobbins was drawn toward sentimentality."
  • Mark Fossie: Obsessed with his Girlfriend Mary Anne, who after being brought to Vietnam leaves him for special forces combat.
  • Dave Jensen: Add a description of this character.
  • Ted Lavender: Carried dope and tranquilizers with him so he would remain calm in any situation.
  • Mary Anne Bell: Mark Fossie's Girlfriend who ends up coming to Vietnam at the same medical base as him. She comes as a sweet young girl, but the longer she stays the more she enjoys the war and strays from what she was. This soon makes problems between her and Mark, until she leaves him. Eventually she runs off with the Special Forces and is never seen again.
  • Lee Strunk: Solider chosen for tunnel duty
  • First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross: Leader of the Platoon, He is infatuated with a girl from home, and can't stop thinking about her. He is a young man himself of 24. Thinks he's not good enough to be the leader. Often is quiet to think to himself.
  • Eddie Diamond: addicted to Narcotics, highest-ranking officer in the Tra Bong medic camp.
  • Curt Lemon: Young and immature, he was messing playing a smoke bomb game in the trees when he died.
  • Elroy Berdahl: An old man in Northern Minnesota
  • Kiowa: A Southern Baptist Native American that carries his grandfathers hatchet and some moccasins with him. "Kiowa had been a fine solider and a fine human being, a devout Baptist..."
  • Rat Kiley: Tells the story of Mark Fossie and Mary Anne. Younger solidier that enjoys fooling around with his friend, Curt lemon.
  • Linda: Tim's first love killed by a brain tumour at 9 years old.
  • Kathleen: Tim O'Brien's daughter.
  • Morty Phillips: Used up his luck running off to a lake which gave the group a two search party scare... but later getting real sick from VC virus cause of it.
  • Sally Gustafson: Kramer girl after getting married. Friend of Norman
  • Nick Veenhof: Kid to tease Linda most about her head hat thing.
  • Azar: An unlikeable person. Went too far in jokes about the dead.
  • Sally Kramer: Norman's love that got married.
  • Max Arnold: Friend of Norman.
  • Martha: Girl fascinating Jimmy cross
  • Timmy: Younger Tim
Show all 26 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “" It all seemed crazy and impossible. Twenty-one years old, an ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I wanted was to live the life I was born to- a mainstream life- I loved baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes- and now I was off the margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it seemed so grotesque and terrible and sad."”
    Tim O'Brien (emily)
  • “"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done."”
    Tim O'Brien (emily)
  • “"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. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead."”
    Tim O'Brien (emily)
  • “I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading....An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.”
    Linda, to Timmy O'Brien in his dreams
  • “"For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe."”
  • “It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.”
    Tim O'Brien
  • “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. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."”
    Tim O'Brien
  • “At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. Though it's odd, you're never more alive then when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.”
    Tim O'Brien
  • “Right then, he thought, he should've done something brave. He should've carried her up the stairs to her room and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he tought of new things he should've done.”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
    Highlighted by 364 Kindle customers
  • A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.
    Highlighted by 334 Kindle customers
  • That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
    Highlighted by 321 Kindle customers
  • They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
    Highlighted by 276 Kindle customers
  • for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
    Highlighted by 252 Kindle customers
  • I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
    Highlighted by 251 Kindle customers
  • 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. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
    Highlighted by 248 Kindle customers
  • Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
    Highlighted by 234 Kindle customers
  • They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.
    Highlighted by 233 Kindle customers
  • Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.
    Highlighted by 202 Kindle customers
Show all 19 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

Vietnam War

First Sentence edit see section history

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey.

Table of Contents edit see section history

1. The Things They Carried
2. Love
3. Spin
4. On The Rainy River
5. Enemies
6. Friends
7. How To Tell a True War Story
8. The Dentist
9. Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
10. Stockings
11. Church
12. The Man I Killed
13. Ambush
14. Style
15. Speaking of Courage
16. Notes
17. In the Field
18. Good Form
19. Field Trip
20. The Ghost Soldiers
21. Night Life
22. The Lives of the Dead

Glossary edit see section history

  • hump it: To carry something.
  • legs or grunts: A person.
  • RTO: Radio telephone operator who carried a lightweight infantry field radio.
  • encyst: To enclose within a cyst
  • piaster: The piastre or piaster was a unit of currency. It was originally equal to one silver dollar or peso, served as the major unit of currency of French Indochina (present-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), and in the Ottoman Empire.
  • bivouac: camp: temporary living quarters specially built by the army for soldiers; "wherever he went in the camp the men were grumbling"

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 108 of 113 in Book Smart Reading List. (community list)
This book is in New York Times Best American Fiction 1981-2006. (authoritative list)
This is book 251 of 1286 in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (authoritative list)
This book is in National Endowment for the Arts The Big Read Books. (authoritative list)
This book is in Guardian 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read. (authoritative list)
This is book 65 of 100 in ALA's Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books: 2000-2009. (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Tim O'Brien (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Country: USA
Publication Date: 1990
ISBN: 978-0618706419
Page Count: 246

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Adults

Adult themes - love, war, death. Adult humor. Adult situations and language.

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