A Trickling Catharsis

In every short short story, there is an inevitable degree of separation. After all, the author only has a matter of pages, rather than chapters, in order to introduce and engage his audience with the world he has created and simultaneously make his point. The entire experience of reading a short story contrasts with a novel much like a mildly interesting conversation between an acquaintance--the sort of acquaintance you run into frequently--contrasts with a friend; it is natural to further develop a relationship with a friend or a novel such as  The Catcher in the Rye, but a little too much exposure to an acquaintance or a short story can become awkwardly intimate.  As the information within a short story is kept to a minimum, so is the content of an acquaintance's conversation, and thus is distance achieved between an individual and both short stories and acquaintances. Within the pages of “The Things They Carried”, Tim O’Brien utilizes this inherent style of short story separation by compiling a series of narratives into one short story that features an intermittently precise syntax and layout along with a consistent theme of childishness juxtaposed with outright vulgarity that manages to create a creeping sense of numbness not only within his characters, but his readers as well.
    The precise manner of the narrative creates a sort of broken-down-robotic voice. The omniscient narrator begins many of the narratives with a brief introductory statement that generally preludes an endless, annoying list of every mundane supply and its consequential weight. The characters and the emotions they experience are addressed in brief, brusque statements, while the routines of their platoon are described with a cacophonous amount of detail. However, despite the computer-manual level of precision, not one single quotation mark can be found for the entire duration of the story nor is any dialogue formatted correctly.  The brief nods to formality in contrast to these deliberate formatting errors creates a paradox of ratiocination within the noxious story, thus extenuating the distance between the narrator and the reader.
    In addition to the flagrant syntax patterns O’Brien utilizes, the content that propels the story reeks of a perverse sort of childishness; the sort of corrupted child leadership that prevails throughout William Goldring’s Lord of the Flies. Indeed, the way the group dynamic is described  could almost be compared to that of a group of boys embarked upon a simple day adventure.  Lieutenant Jimmy Cross is burdened with leadership, but infatuated with Martha and cherishes the innocent memory of touching her knee. Ted Lavender is “scared” (470), Henry Dobbins is a “big man”(470), Rat Kiley carries “all the things a medic must carry, including M&M’s”(471) in addition to his comic books,  Norman Bowker--who carries a diary--tells Kiowa that if there’s “one thing I hate, it’s a silent Indian”(479), and, after investigating a tunnel, Lee Strunk makes “a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very happy”(475).  The narrative would be of an overwhelmingly wholesome sort if not for the guns and vulgarity, the burning of villages and indigenous people, and Jimmy Cross blaming his love of Martha for the death of Ted Lavender.
    The callous juxtaposition between childlike camaraderie and mindless destruction is dismaying, to say the least. Instead of joining Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s platoon in the jungles of Vietnam, the reader takes a step back and doesn’t come any closer to understanding Jimmy Cross or the men under his command. Eventually, as the story drones on about the weight of a PRC-25 radio, Ted Lavender’s tranquilizers, the definition of “to hump”, and the deadliness of their very lives, the reader becomes indifferent. There simply is no empathy to be found in modern American thought for a group who goes into more detail about the contents of their backpacks than the number of souls they have taken. Only when the reader recovers from his initial shock and stops making excuses, making connections, and making sense, do they become exactly like Jimmy Cross’s doomed men: numb.
    The numbness created by the distant nature of the story is compounded by the fact that O’Brien uses a consistent passive tense. Instead of bringing the Vietnam War into the present and actively involving the reader, O’Brien chooses to firmly cement his narrative in time. The reader is completely ignored except for one paragraph that preludes the death of Ted Lavender. The narrator is describing the fears that arise from investigating tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area when he imploring tells the reader about “how you found yourself worrying about odd things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you screamed how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it? Would they have the courage to drag you out?”(474). By keeping the reader firmly out of his thoughts except for this one character-saving moment, O’Brien manages to convey the idea that the men within his story are not robots; just robot-like. In fourteen pages of achingly monotonous macabre detail, O’Brien ties the shrunken aspects of his character’s outside lives--their religions, their families, their girlfriends, their dreams--back to whats left of their souls by admitting fear.
    The soldiers found within “The Things They Carried” exude a distinct lack of emotion. Before the story has even progressed to the point of Ted Lavender’s death, the narrator nonchalantly mentions that the group wraps his body in his poncho as an example of how every tool they carry wields a dual purpose. The whole narrative is so vociferously devoid of humanity and filled with mindless detail that the only way to maintain a point of view is to fall in line with the meandering thoughts of the narrator and give the same measure of compassion to a steel helmet as a nameless villager. The numbness the men in Jimmy Cross’s platoon enshroud themselves in becomes inexorably tangible as the reader is passively dragged through the jungles of Vietnam and begin to lose his perspective and willingness to recognize humanity, the passing of time, the idealistic triumph of good over evil, and proper punctuation. O’Brien achieves a frightening degree of success in creating an overwhelmingly pervasive emotion of numbness not only within his paper and ink world, but also with his flesh and blood audience.

Works Cited
O’Brien, Tim. "The Things They Carried". New York: Touchstone, 2007. Print.