The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

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Recommended: Personal experience writing

Tim O’Brien, the author of many war novels and short stories such as The Things They Carried, is a worldly man whose many influences include his love of learning, his special bond with his family and his experiences during the Vietnam War. Tim’s unique style of writing, known as verisimilitude or blending of fiction and non-fiction, lends itself to stories of an almost autobiographical nature, however Tim makes changes to make the writing more interesting. Tim uses the aptly names character of Tim O’Brien to express the connections of himself and his character namesake. Over the course of the many short stories in The Things They Carried O’Brien directly and indirectly compares many important aspects of his own life such as his childhood and family life, his military experiences and his love of education to that of his character Tim O’Brien.
Tim O’Brien lived a happy life with his family growing up in Worthington, Minnesota, he went to Macalester College in nearby St. Paul’s Minnesota and had a full scholarship to a bachelor’s degree at Harvard, and he was living his dreams. All until the day he received his draft notice in the mail, O’Brien had been drafted into the Vietnam War and just like the character of Tim in O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried and O’Brien had been stripped of his dreams and his innocence. Through the experiences of the character Tim, O’Brien is representing the experiences and feelings of himself about the Vietnam War and other aspects of his life. In this way O’Brien’s art imitates his life as he writes about things that actually happened to him or those around him. The style Tim writes with is known as Verisimilitude or fiction rooted in reality, this style of writing allows O’Brien to directly conn...

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...uthor, Veteran Tim
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O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Print.
Smith, Jack. "The things he carries: for Tim O'Brien, the Vietnam War has remained a crucible in his fiction, but the power of imagination and memory, and 'our elusive interior worlds,' loom large, too." The Writer July 2010: 16. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.

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