The Things They Carried By Tim O Brien's Narrative Style

A writer’s narrative style reflects his worldview and novelistic purposes. An example of it will be the novel “The Things they Carried” by Tim O’Brien. The author creates meaning by how he has a writing style of imposing and informal. To prove this point, it is on page 14 where it said “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity” (pg.14). This begins a huge list of how the soldiers each added incautious things that the men must somehow carry. The men have been carrying the burdens which including the emotional things that were inside of them which is composed of anguish, fear, adoration, and desire. (pg.14) Several versions of the same

story appear because these men carry the weights throughout the war. Each of them tell their difficult trials and tribulations that they go through in the war itself.
“The Things They Carried” is written from a writer’s third point of view in which the narrator is identified as "Tim O'Brien," a middle-aged writer veteran.

The author was a protagonist in which he was a middle aged writer and was also a Vietnam War veteran. The focus of the novel is mostly of the author “O'Brien's" remembering of the past and changing the details of these memories of his service in Vietnam into meaning. The author, Tim O'Brien, illuminates the characters of the men with whom he served and draws meaning about the war from meditations on their relationships. One of the example to prove that he was a character in the story was the section “On the Rainy River”. This chapter basically talks about the author’s point of view. He starts the story, "In June of 1968, I was drafted to fight a war I hated" (pg. 40) the chapter goes on to show his feelings and reactions about being drafted into the war. It shows that Tim O'Brien is human, and that he has his faults just like everyone else. A few months after getting his draft card and notice, in mid-July, Tim thought "I began thinking seriously about Canada. The border lay a few hundred lies north, an eight-hour drive. Both my conscience and my instincts were telling me to make a break for it, just take off and run like hell and never stop." (pg. 44) This shows a sign of a coward’s way of leaving the war. This considers to be a paradox in which in order for him to be courageous, he acted more like a

coward.
He mostly breaks it down into form of repetition.

The author, Tim O’Brien, frequently repeats certain incidents, which is often bringing incremental detail with each of the characters expressive. One example of this is the scene of Kiowa's death, in which he mentioned five times, is the core of most of the novel's action and the facilitator for most characters development. (pg.151) The repetition is a formal method that O'Brien employs to know the truth of a story by adding and subtracting detail. The effect of this for a wise reader is a feeling that simulates "O'Brien's" intense obsession with the stories he tells and retells because they run through his retention practically

repetitively.
O’Brien uses narrative style to embody his meaning of the story by how the author didn’t write it for the purpose of them going to war, he write it for the purpose of how he wrote it for the idea that there is no simple truth meaning that the stories are not in chronological order. He often challenges us to believe or not of the aspects of his stories and hazes the boundaries between fiction and truth. By calling the veracity of vignettes into question, O'Brien underscores the overall style that defines “The Things They Carried” constantly changing at random, that is unexpectedly marked by telling associations which is not easily defined.