Third Person Narration In Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

In telling stories through a third-person perspective, O’Brien uses it to gain some space from the traumatic experience Tim and his squad had in Vietnam. Several of the stories in the work, precisely those focused on a predominantly painful experience, they are told from a third-person point of view, so that O’Brien can sustain a space from his own memories. For instance, in the story “The Man I Killed,” he defines the physical features of the Vietnamese soldier’s body and shows how the other soldiers react to him killing the man, but throughout the whole demonstration he doesn’t at any point describe how he feels about the situation. His remorse is implied in this lack of reaction. The other men of the squad joked about how their friend’s bodies appeared than deal, rather than dealing with the impact of their death; O’Brien uses the third-person narration to achieve the distance that would of been impossible with first-person narration.

The use of third person narration also gives a firm amount of consistency to the work; O’Brien doesn’t realize that his involvement is any more terrible than that of the other soldiers.

He does understand though, for instance, that he was not the single soldier to experience Kiowa’s death, and that Norman Bowker and Jimmy Cross faced it differently and just as realistically. The work is titled The Things They Carried, rather than The Things I Carried, This is cause O’Brien is not speaking simply for himself, or even for the other soldiers that seen it too. This is obvious from the transformation of theme in the last story to the death of Linda, O’Brien’s initial love, and he is not even speaking only about Vietnam. The impression that people carry heavy emotional burdens is a mutual one, and the change between first-person narrative and third-person narrative is a thought of O’Brien’s belief that by explaining his own story, he is explaining the story of

many.