The Things They Carried

Throughout this novel I have felt like the war is described very well. I felt this because of the form O'Brien has used to write this book. As we reach the end of a chapter we do not know what is going to happen next. Every chapter is so different from each other. Some of the chapters are connected, but they have a span of pages between them. I feel he wrote using this style to show the chaos of war. In war you never know what is going to happen next and that what makes the chapters exciting and random. You feel you are going through what he has been going through. To a certain extent I believe that O'Brien purposly wrote the book in this form, but at the same time I think he did it because as your telling a story you go on and on and on but then once you move on from one point to another you come to realize that you forgot to say a detail about the last story. He shows how he does this by stating:

"Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit you until twenty years later in your sleep, and you wake up... and you forgoten the point again" (O'Brien 82).

This statement was a bold statement that stood out to me and showed how even after war the soliders still think about the stories and want to "wake up and start shaking [their] wife" so they can tell them the story, but their wife doesn't know what the point of the story was and in the end of the story the solider doesn't either (O'Brien 82). Us as the reader's of The Things They Carried, are in the same boat as the solider's wifes because we don't know what the point is half the time, but I'm sure by the end of the book we will have an explanation for it all and understand how the chapters go together.

Posted By: CHELSEA STRANG :)