The Things They Carried - - An Introduction

     Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is the fictionalized account of Alpha Company, a platoon of soldiers stationed in Vietnam in the late 60's and early 70's during the war. What makes O'Brien's work unique is the way it defies its own genre, giving little lip service to the events of the war itself, and instead making the novel about the psychological experience and aftermath of war. The typical combat novel plot structure is abandoned; there is no cohesive series of events, no real emphasis on their mission or objectives in Vietnam and, most interestingly (to me at least), almost no references to combat unless it plays a significant role in the character development of one of the members of alpha company.
     This is just the begging of what makes The Things They Carried a contemporary work of meta-fiction. One of the most important aspects of the novel is the way that O'Brien systematically attacks your brain with conflicting notions of "truth", as we'll see later. There is also the manner in which O'Brien violates conventional narrator levels, obsessively calls attention to "The Things They Carried" as a war story, and leaves readers  shuffling back dozens of pages at a time, desperate to figure out if they've missed something, or simply fallen victim to O'Brien's intentionally ambiguous story line. As we'll see, "The Things They Carried" is overflowing with the literary devices of metafiction.