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The Things They Carried (Spark Notes Edition)
by: Tim O'Brien, SparkNotes Editors

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Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 809
EAN: 9781586638276
ISBN: 1586638270
Label: SparkNotes
Manufacturer: SparkNotes
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: December 15, 2002
Publisher: SparkNotes
Studio: SparkNotes
Sales Rank: 1028769

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
In 1979, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato--a novel about the Vietnam War--won the National Book Award. In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated. Neither a novel nor a short story collection, it is an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later.

Amazon.com Review:
"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

A finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Things They Carried marks a subtle but definitive line of demarcation between Tim O'Brien's earlier works about Vietnam, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and the fictional Going After Cacciato, and this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true. In "On the Rainy River," the character Tim O'Brien responds to his draft notice by driving north, to the Canadian border where he spends six days in a deserted lodge in the company of an old man named Elroy while he wrestles with the choice between dodging the draft or going to war. The real Tim O'Brien never drove north, never found himself in a fishing boat 20 yards off the Canadian shore with a decision to make. The real Tim O'Brien quietly boarded the bus to Sioux Falls and was inducted into the United States Army. But the truth of "On the Rainy River" lies not in facts but in the genuineness of the experience it depicts: both Tims went to a war they didn't believe in; both considered themselves cowards for doing so. Every story in The Things They Carried speaks another truth that Tim O'Brien learned in Vietnam; it is this blurred line between truth and reality, fact and fiction, that makes his book unforgettable. --Alix Wilber

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Absolutely a number 10
Of all the books published on the Vietnam War, this is the grandaddy. O'Brien's ability to capture the mood and setting of grunts sent to fight an unjust war is amazing and heartrending. While surviving with your buddy was the most important task in 'Nam, the ways to make that happen differed dramatically. If it meant fragging your Lieutenant, it was often done. If it meant shooting yourself in the foot, lots of soldiers didn't hesitate. O'Brien shows us the insanity of the times, putting the reader in the middle of firefights and boredom. His writing is above the genre' and even develops a style of its own, often copied. O'Brien is the master.
Ron Lealos author of Don't Mean Nuthin'

Rating:

- Fictional with Non-Fictional Principles
This novel is like your perfect medium blend of coffee.

It is classic fiction due to the fluid way the story moves, but it teaches the reader that there are invisible effects of war, a non-fictional principle that is still applicable today. Within the personality each character, the reader will be able to identify someone he knows and also relate that element to something within himself.

A true classic. I laud O'Brien for the impeccable quality of the story and for unabashedly including the bittersweet reality that (a) many wounds of war are not visible; and (b) war is not as glamourous as a mere action movie might portray.

Rating:

- Got me and taught me
The granddaddy. This one grabbed me and I haven't recovered. It was a textbook. The stories are so vivid and heartfelt, the language so real, the actions so heroic. Tried my best to emulate in:
[[ASIN:1439219826 Don't Mean Nuthin']

Rating:

- Unlike anything I have read before
My son had to read this book for school so one day I picked it up and couldn't put it down. It really defies categorization. At first it seems like a collection of short stories about Vietnam. But the stories are related, though not necessarily dependent on each other. It offers the most amazing blend of fact and fiction which is one of the main themes of the book. What is reality? How do you define truth? It is written very simply so in one sense it's an "easy" read. But the impact will rock you to the core. And it IS a war story, so not really for the faint of heart, including the language used by the soldiers. (Normally, I'm not a fan of a lot expletives but in this case, they ring true to the situation.) I highly recommend this book!

Rating:

- An Entertaining and Enlightening Introduction to Story Telling
Sections of this book were assigned to me as coursework. What I read was so entertaining that I immediately purchased the book and had read and reread it within a weekend. I admit that I'd not have seen the depth of O'Brien's true literary genius had my professor not shed light on some of the subtle issues addressed herein (i.e. the retelling of The Lemon Tree story as a portrait of literary progression through history, etc.). Still, even without an appreciation of or interest in top quality literature, the interested reader will find great insight into character and plot development within this literary masterpeice.
Be warned though that this story is not a historical account of a soldier's horrific experience in Vietnam. Instead, the author's experience in Vietnam is used to illustrate ... Read More

Books : The Things They Carried (Spark Notes Edition)