The Things They Carried as Composite Novel

A great article about The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.

In lieu of an abstract, here’s the first paragraph:

When Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone appeared in 1973, critics lauded the memoir and promptly prepared a place for the new author – three years out of Vietnam – in the ranks of the contemporary war writers who were trying to record what was happening in the bloody quagmire in which America, uncharacteristically, found itself mired. Such a characterization seemed borne out in his next two novels; both Northern Lights and Going After Cacciato were clearly representative of a new literature of the Vietnam experience. But in each of these works there is also ample evidence of his concern with issues broader than a specific war in Southeast Asia: indeed, even early readers recognized that If I Die in a Combat Zone was no mere raw emotional record of war experiences but rather “a spare, poetically allusive, and classically toned personal memoir” …

– from O’Gorman, Farrell. “The Things They Carried as Composite Novel.” WAR LITERATURE AND THE ARTS 10 (1998): 289-309.

Direct link: https://www.wlajournal.com/wlaarchive/10_2/FarrellOGorman.pdf

Note: The link is currently broken, but you might be able to google up a copy of the text from another repository!

Entry for The Things They Carried on LinkedShortStories.com

Share

Did you find this site useful? You can show your appreciation by liking, sharing or subscribing to my short story cycle, Depending on the Morning Sun.

You might also find these materials interesting ...