“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.” O’Brien’s tendency throughout The Things They Carried is to explore this one particular why of stories. Granted, each story has it’s own why, or maybe several – sometimes even none – but when the writer steps back from his “story-truth,” as O’Brien does in the chapter “Good Form,” he does nothing to clarify why the story is.
This obfuscation is well worth it in this case, however. By pulling the reader back from the directly told stories of the previous chapters, the story expands from just the twenty-one men in the stories to a wider world and a larger time scale. “Stories are for joining the past to the future,” O’Brien mentions, and in this case, a dreamlike bridge is drawn, as Curt Lemon was, up through the trees of the war and into a present time, where an aging veteran writes for his own particular why. O’Brien does this several times throughout the book, and each time solidifies the true story.
It isn’t easy for a writer to write to an audience. Without sounding cliché, he must address the reader and hold their interest through a conversation, all while keeping track of the plot. The same problem continuously faces a composer. Through music, he must write a little story woven through the melody, and one portrayed in the instrumentation, another hidden in the harmony; and throughout the whole piece, he must tie them together with one bit “Why?” for the listener to explore.
When I write, both music and words, these stories are really what I’m thinking about. I don’t think too much about creating a bridge to get from here to there, or to try and remember how I got where I am, just as I’m sure that O’Brien wasn’t thinking of how he could write a novel that somehow spanned twenty-some years of his life, so much as he was thinking about telling the stories in The Things They Carried.
Perhaps that’s what he carried; the stories. Stories of a man he killed, stories of comrades being lifted to the trees by the sunlight, stories of a grown man and his daughter. Each of these has it’s own why, or several, or none. When he wrote this book, he was getting the reader to help share the burden of these stories, to hump it with him, all the while asking why.
<p>Note how I use big words and a distant writing style with Cummings-like grammar to try to impress - or at least confuse - my professor XD I probably should’ve started on this a little sooner ^</p>
