An analysis of the narrative structure of The Things They Carried NOTE: Lecture notes are in the notes section of each slide as well citation of articles used.

1. Fitting the Pieces Together:
The Narrative Design of
The Things They Carried
By Tim O’Brien

2. Defining Narrative Structure
A story or a narrative is an
account of events. But it is not
just any sort of account of any
events. It is a selection and
ordering of events into a
meaningful pattern. More
simply put, narrative structure
is about the ways in which a
story has been structured or
put together.

4. • It expresses the devastation of war while simultaneously
keeping the dignity of the soldier intact
• It develops one of the central themes regarding the nature
of reality and what is TRUTH, what he will term
“emotional truth”
• This will feed into O’Brien’s metafictional musings on the
nature of fiction and its ability to reveal truth more truly
than reality

5. - Catalogues (listings)
- Episodic , short story units
- Multiple versions of the same event which
has a circular effect
- Repetition– on the sentence, paragraph,
concept and chapter level
- Characters through different points of view
- Metafictional elements (protagonist’s
name, the epigraphs, the self-conscious
reflections about the fictional writing
process)
- Juxtaposition between
highly figurative, often lofty syntax
- Coarse, rough, sexual, common
conversational diction of the soldier
(like Rat Kiley and Azar)
- Sureal, lofty imagery of nature
- Brutal, journalistic descriptions of
events

7. 1) Author’s name versus
protagonist
2) Usage of the epigraphs
3) Multiple versions of events
4) Protagonist’s admission that a
story he just told was not true or
the story is presented in
fragments in a later chapter or
chapters
5) Changes in point in view (Rat
Kiley’s story in “Sweetheart of
the Song Tra Bong”)

8. “Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing
which self-consciously and systematically draws
attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose
questions about the relationship between fiction
and reality.” –Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The
Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.

9. “ ‘You writer types’ he said, ‘you’ve got long
memories’ “ (28)
“ ‘And do me a favor. Don’t mention
anything about—’ “
‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t.’ “ (30)

11. Symbolism of checkers: “There were red checkers
and black checkers. . . You knew where you stood.
You knew the score. . .There was a winner and a
loser. There were rules” (32).
O’Brien will introduce Curt Lemon’s death
on page 32 with horrific ambiguity and
understatement: “Curt Lemon hanging in
pieces from a tree” but then readers only
get the full story in “How to Tell a True War
Story” and then it isn’t given to us as a full
narrative, but rather in pieces

12. “I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch
Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field . . . And as I write about these
things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. . .The bad stuff
never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and
over” ( 32).
“The thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material
where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present.
The memory traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles
for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and
shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a
street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you.” ( 35).
“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in
the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where
you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing
to remember except the story” ( 38)

14. “ America was divided on these and a thousand other issues” (40).
“. . .Oddly, thought, it was almost entirely an intellectual activity”
Stupidly, and with a kind of smug removal, that I can’t begin to fathom, I assumed
that the problems of killing and dying did not fall with in my special province” (41).
“ I was above it” ( 41)
“ I remember the rage in my stomach” ( 42)

15. Pages 57-59
• Highlights O’Brien’s technique and usage of repetition to unify his
narrative, as he returns to the format from “The Things They
Carried”.
• The highly poetic syntax and figurative diction are a departure from
the bluntness and crassness of where he is in the trenches and the
soldiers’ language reflects a raw brutality and visceral need to be
brave.
• The listing creates a different sense of his collective emotional
memory. There are images that occur in the future to express the
timelessness of this moment and amplify the element that he is at a
crossroads of his fate, viewing, so to speak his entire fate of past,
present, future.

16. Short, episodic chapters –reflect O’Brien’s craft as a writer in liking chapters
together.
• “Enemies” follows Tim’s moral crisis before the war; this chapter highlights
the psychological impact of war when you are in the midst of the war. The
moral ambiguity is intensified --from Tim’s sense of confusion regarding
the lack of clear answers finds its way in Vietnam: “ The distinction between
good guys and bad guys disappeared for him” ( 63).
• “Friends” captures the soldier’s attempts to control their fate—to go out on
their own terms and their desire to be whole in more than one aspect.
• Ultimately, the desire to survive is too strong and overcomes it

17. • Symmetry of Rat Kiley as the narrator of the letter story: “ Rat had a
reputation for exaggeration and overstatement, a compulsion to rev up
the facts and for most of us it was a normal procedure to discount sixty
or seventy percent of anything he had to say” (89).
• This chapter is justifying the intent of The Things They Carried. The
narrator is also providing clues to the content, structure, and
interpretation of the novel
“In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what
happened from what seemed to happen…the angels of vision are skewed”
(71).

18. “In a true war story, if there’s a moral at
all, it’s like the thread that makes the
cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t
extract the meaning without unraveling
the deeper meaning” (77)
“. . . You can tell a true war story by its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (69).
“there is always that surreal seemingness, which
makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact
represent the hard and exact truth as it seemed”
( 71).