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    Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried: Based on the Book by Tim O'Brien
    Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried: Based on the Book by Tim O'Brien
    Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried: Based on the Book by Tim O'Brien
    Ebook64 pages44 minutes

    Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried: Based on the Book by Tim O'Brien

    By Worth Books

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    About this ebook

    So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of The Things They Carried tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Tim O’Brien’s book.

    Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. 
     
    This Summary of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien includes:
     
    • Historical context
    • Story-by-story summaries
    • Character analysis
    • Themes and symbols
    • Important quotes
    • Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the source work
     
    About The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien:
     
    A New York Times Book of the Century and Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Things They Carried is a modern classic and an essential work of literature about the Vietnam War.
     
    Brilliantly blending fact and fiction, autobiography and imagination, Tim O’Brien draws on personal experience to tell the stories of a platoon of American soldiers sent to fight Vietnam. As they trek through jungles and across mountains, the young men of Alpha Company carry radios, assault rifles, C-rations, and good luck charms—as well as grief, love, terror, and the shame of cowardice. Most of all, they carry the dream of escape, not yet knowing that the burden of memory will haunt them long after the war is over.
     
    Taught in classrooms all over the world, The Things They Carried is a groundbreaking work of art that reveals the true nature of war and celebrates the healing power of storytelling.
     
    The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 31, 2017
    ISBN9781504043762
    Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried: Based on the Book by Tim O'Brien
    Author

    Worth Books

    Worth Books’ smart summaries get straight to the point and provide essential tools to help you be an informed reader in a busy world, whether you’re browsing for new discoveries, managing your to-read list for work or school, or simply deepening your knowledge. Available for fiction and nonfiction titles, these are the book summaries that are worth your time.  

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      Book preview

      Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried - Worth Books

      Contents

      Context

      Overview

      Cast of Characters

      Summary

      Character Analysis

      Themes and Symbols

      Direct Quotes and Analysis

      Trivia

      What’s That Word?

      Critical Response

      About Tim O’Brien

      For Your Information

      Bibliography

      Copyright

      Context

      The Things They Carried was originally published in 1990, fifteen years after the fall of Saigon brought an end to the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien served as an infantryman during the war and wrote his first two books on his experiences: the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) and the National Book Award–winning novel Going After Cacciato (1978). Most of the longer stories in The Things They Carried had previously been published in magazines and literary journals. However, many of the shorter pieces, including Love, Notes, and Good Form, first appeared in the book and are crucial to its novel-in-stories form and its key themes.

      The national trauma of the Vietnam War—a conflict that bitterly divided Americans and demoralized the country’s armed forces—led to a wave of books and films attempting to make sense of the experience. The tone and content of these creative efforts varied widely, but many of the earliest and most influential, including Michael Herr’s New Journalism book, Dispatches (1977), and Francis Ford Coppola’s blockbuster film Apocalypse Now (1979), employed bold formal innovations and hallucinatory imagery in an effort to capture the surreal nature of the war. These works were strongly associated with the anti-war movement and sought to bring home to American audiences the shattering experience of fighting in Vietnam. By 1990, however, the focus had shifted to how the nation and its veterans might recover from the war. This guiding interest connects such disparate works as Bobbie Ann Mason’s acclaimed novel In Country (1985), the coming-of-age story of a girl whose father died in Vietnam, and the hugely popular Rambo films starring Sylvester Stallone as a former Green Beret practicing guerilla warfare tactics against corrupt law enforcement officials and America’s Cold War enemies.

      The Things They Carried synthesizes these two trends in Vietnam War literature. Updating a format—the linked story collection, or novel-in-stories—closely associated with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), O’Brien conveys how strange and terrible it felt to be an American foot soldier in Vietnam, and testifies to the power and the limitations of storytelling in helping the war’s survivors to heal. The book’s artful blend of fact and fiction, memory and imagination, has made it an essential work of art about war and trauma, and a staple of English and creative writing courses all over the world.

      Overview

      Twenty years after his tour of duty in Vietnam, Tim O’Brien tells stories about his fellow foot soldiers in Alpha Company. Although the protagonist of The Things They Carried shares a name and a similar biography with the real Tim O’Brien, he is a fictional character. The blend of fact and fiction, or happening-truth and story-truth, is one of the novel’s key themes.

      Some soldiers did not make it home from the war. Ted Lavender was shot in the head by a sniper. Curt Lemon was playing a game of catch with a smoke grenade when he stepped on a land mine and was blown to pieces. Kiowa, one of the best-loved members of Alpha Company and O’Brien’s closest friend, died during a mortar attack. The platoon was camped

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