Tim O Brien's The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien, Vietnam War veteran, perhaps more than any other author gives eloquent and contrary voice to American involvement in war. From his own experiences in Vietnam, O’ Brien wrote a series of anti-war theme novels, including his acclaimed 1987 short story “The Things They Carried,” considered one of the top 100 short stories of the twentieth century (e.g., John Updike and Katrina Kenison, eds., The Best American Short Stories of the Century, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999). In his novel The Nuclear Age, O’ Brien goes beyond the setting of the Vietnam War, spreading fears initiated in the Vietnam experience to paranoia in the advent of the nuclear age.
O’Brien’s own experience as a soldier in the Vietnam War has a pervasive influence on his writing. Calling O’ Brien a “trauma artist,” critic Mark A. Heberle describes the “paralyzing, literally overwhelming fear” of the scenes in “The Things They Carried” (A Trauma Artist: Tim O’ Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam,” p. 127). This type of apprehensive emotion, which O’ Brien personally experienced, strongly affected his opinion of war. He became an anti-war spokesperson through his fiction, and the moral position he developed as a result is evident in his writing, giving voice to a conscience informed by war.
But the anti-war theme does not stop …show more content…
Uncertainty and anxiety have always been brought on by the realities of war. Twentieth century conflicts, including WWII, The Cold War, and the war in Vietnam, fueled fears about man’s ability to protect and defend the nation and threatened the way of life of tens of thousands of young Americans who were drafted. Response to the war in Vietnam divided the country and led to protests calling for an end to the war. O’Brien lends his voice to the gravity of war protest in a wholesome attempt to show the evils of war. He then extends his theme to post-Vietnam era, to the ultimate: to nuclear

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