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Definition of Motif
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the central themes of a book... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of... read full definition
The Things They Carried
Explanation and Analysis—Carried Things:
A central motif in the collection's titular story is the act of carrying. Teeming with lists, "The Things They Carried" reads like an itemized chronicle of the tangible and intangible things that the soldiers in Alpha Company carry with them through Vietnam. The tangible items include tools, weapons, rations, bandages, and tokens that have sentimental or superstitious meaning. The intangible items include responsibility, emotional baggage, secrets, fear, and memories. Moreover, the narrator claims that they carry the weather, land, and forces of nature:
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. [...] They carried their own lives.
In this expositional story, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross serves as a kind of protagonist. Through him, the narrator indicates the degree to which the soldiers in Alpha Company carry a mixture of tangible items, intangible emotions, and the land around them. The immense responsibility he feels for his men is mixed with his longing for Martha. Ted Lavender dies in a moment when Cross is distracted by this longing, which he blames himself for: "and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war." Cross proceeds to burn some of the sentimental items that he's been carrying—Martha's letters and photographs—and replaces them with guilt and disillusionment.
Throughout the story, the narrator often takes care to specify the weight of the tangible items, emphasizing their materiality and mass. The "necessities or near-necessities" weigh "between 12 and 18 pounds, depending upon a man's habit." No man carries the same weight, which represents the degree to which everyone's experience of the war varies based on circumstance and identity. Although they experience it together, no two soldiers can entirely relate to each other. Because he is the platoon's RTO (radio telephone operator), Mitchell Sanders carries a radio that weighs "26 pounds with its battery." Rat Kiley's medic supplies weigh "nearly 18 pounds." Henry Dobbins is a machine gunner, and therefore carries the M-60, "which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always loaded." He also carries "between 10 and 15 pounds of ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders." The narrator never adds all of these weights up, which gives the reader an impression of endless, incalculable accumulation. In the war, the soldiers constantly collect new supplies and baggage to carry with them.
It is worth noting the pronoun usage in the title—and throughout the story overall. The reader eventually understands that the narrator is O'Brien, and that he knows about the weight of all of these items because he took part in carrying them. Nevertheless, although O'Brien largely serves as a first-person narrator in the rest of the collection, he does not insert himself into the titular story whatsoever. He introduces many of the central characters who will appear in later stories, like Jimmy Cross, Mitchell Sanders, and Kiowa, but he gives the impression that he is simply an uninvolved, omniscient narrator. The soldiers are "they," rather than "we." Through this third-person plural narration, O'Brien creates distance and separates himself from the carrying in this expositional story. Perhaps he means to suggest that the act of writing is his chosen way of carrying the burden of the war—or his attempt at letting it go.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Reading and Writing:
Already in the first story, it becomes clear that reading and writing are important to the soldiers in Alpha Company. The power of the written word, both for those writing it and for those reading it, becomes a central motif in the collection.
In "The Things They Carried," the narrator runs through the personal items that individual soldiers consider to be "necessities or near-necessities." For three of the soldiers, these include books:
Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Norman Bowker finds it necessary to be able to record his experiences and emotions. For Rat Kiley, the recreational pleasure of comic books is a necessity. In fact, when he hurts himself and is sent to the hospital in Japan, the soldiers give him "a stack of comic books for hospital reading." One of Kiowa's necessities is the solace and strength provided by the Bible. The narrator goes on to mention other items that gesture towards the power of the written word, such as "USO stationery and pencils and pens." Additionally, the men carry The Stars and Stripes, the U.S .military's newspaper, and Psy Ops leaflets, to transmit propaganda to the Vietcong and its sympathizers.
Other characters likely carry books with them as well. For example, it's safe to assume that O'Brien, as the collection's principal storyteller, also would have carried a diary with him through Vietnam. The vivid details and precise descriptions give the impression that his material did not all come together after the war, but rather that he recorded some of it during the war. In fact, the reader might even question whether the detail about Norman Bowker's diary actually points to himself. Later in the collection, in "Notes," the narrator admits to having collapsed some of his own experiences with those of Bowker's when he wrote "Speaking of Courage."
The final story of the collection, "The Lives of the Dead," begins with the claim that "stories can save us." In its entirety, The Things They Carried seems to be O'Brien's attempt to back up this claim. By writing stories, he gives new life to his dead friends, to his memories, and to his sense of the war's meaning and meaninglessness. In certain moments, he seems to connect his long-term wellbeing after the war to the catharsis he got from writing about it. Norman Bowker—who commits suicide in 1978—did not publish any texts about the war, but he does write a letter to O'Brien, in which he states that O'Brien's first book "brought back all kinds of memories." He also asks O'Brien to write a story about his experience of not knowing how to talk about the war: "I'd write it myself except I can't ever find any words." The story that initially comes of this request does not satisfy Norman Bowker. After Bowker's death, O'Brien reworks the story, which results in "Speaking of Courage."
Before the narrative even begins, in the book's dedication, O'Brien already gestures at the power of the written word: "This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa." The Things They Carried not only recounts the men's appreciation and love for one another but springs out of it.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Stage Presence:
Throughout The Things They Carried, the soldiers in Alpha Company—all of whom are men in their late teens and early twenties—banter and joke to introduce levity into difficult situations. The idea of war as a comedy show becomes a motif, as the soldiers repeatedly play with language to emphasize that they are unfazed by the violence and suffering they witness and participate in. As the men joke around, O'Brien suggests that performance is central to gender expression—and that performed masculinity is central to war.
The motif of comedic performance is introduced in the first story, "The Things They Carried." On April 16, Lee Strunk is randomly chosen to search a tunnel in Than Khe. The suspense of the narration at first seems to be a false alarm, as Lee Strunk makes it out of the tunnel unharmed. As the men make dark jokes about Strunk coming "right out of the grave," being a "fuckin' zombie," and belonging to "spook city," Lee Strunk makes a "funny ghost sound" and Ted Lavender is shot in the head. Many of the stories' most serious moments feature a similar pairing of lighthearted, boyish joking with the utmost seriousness.
O'Brien encapsulates this tendency toward the end of the first story:
They found jokes to tell.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy.
In this passage, the narrator explains that the men's jokes and do not come from cynicism or indifference, but rather that it is sensitivity that sparks their "hard language." It's easier for the men to express themselves euphemistically, because indirect language gives them a certain measure of distance from difficult experiences. Treating the war as a stage and their participation in it as "stage presence" makes it easier to bear. When the narrator explains that they feel like "actors," and that everything they do feels "scripted," he reminds the reader that many of the men sent to Vietnam had no desire to participate in the war.
The narrator addresses this again in "The Ghost Soldiers." When he gets back at Bobby Jorgenson for not treating him for shock, he describes the force that takes over his body, likening it to being an actor in a movie:
It’s as if you’re in a movie. There’s a camera on you, so you begin acting, you’re somebody else. You think of all the films you’ve seen, Audie Murphy and Gary Cooper and the Cisco Kid, all those heroes, and you can’t help falling back on them as models of proper comportment.
When they behave like comedians and actors, the soldiers use the feeling of performance to distance themselves from their actions, experiences, and surroundings. However, the narrator does suggest that jokes and performance aren't always possible. For example, when they find Kiowa's body in "In the Field," Bowker asks Azar "So where's the joke?" Even if Azar has been making a steady stream of jokes until this point, he becomes unable to joke: "No joke." Additionally, O'Brien points out that while it was possible to "[make] jokes" about ghosts in the daylight, "you turned into a believer" at night. The death of friends and pitch darkness wipe away the men's stage presence, as they have no choice but to stare gravity in the face.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Masks of Composure:
At multiple points in The Things They Carried, the narrator discusses the soldiers' fear of showing fear. He sums this up in the collection's first and titular story: "They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it." The motif of masculine dignity shows up repeatedly throughout the work, as the men mask their vulnerability with toughness. Often, conversations unravel into simple jokes when they are on the verge of turning into heart-to-hearts.
In "The Things They Carried," the narrator writes that cowardice is one of the heaviest things that the soldiers carry. As a result, the soldiers carry themselves with what the narrator calls "masks of composure":
They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
In this heart-wrenching passage, O'Brien sums up something that often brings people into war: the fear of admitting that one is scared to fight and the fear of dishonor. These fears are linked with masculinity, as society has not traditionally allowed men to reveal their emotions—particularly ones of a vulnerable nature.
Throughout the stories in the collection, the men's masks of composure often result in an inability to express themselves candidly. In "Notes," when the narrator recounts receiving a letter from Norman Bowker after the war, he describes that the letter was tonally all over the place. In the years after the war, Bowker still—or perhaps more than ever— found it difficult to express his emotions about what he lived through. He asserts that veterans who express their grievances is one thing he "really [hates]":
The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know what to feel. In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much:
God, this is starting to sound like some jerkoff vet crying in his beer. Sorry about that. I’m no basket case—not even any bad dreams. [...] But I shouldn’t bitch. One thing I hate—really hate—is all those whiner-vets.
Bowker's metaphorical mask of composure seems to extend to his mouth, as it prevents him from telling people in his hometown about his experiences in the war. This is what the story "Speaking of Courage" is about. Driving in circles around the town and feeling increasingly alienated, Bowker thinks about the war story he would have told his high school sweetheart or father if it were "a good time to talk." He feels, however, that it's never a good time: "There was nothing to say. He could not talk about it and never would." A few years after the war, Bowker takes his own life.
In "Notes," the narrator reveals that he has collapsed his own story about the night Kiowa died with that of Bowker. This shows to the reader that O'Brien also finds it challenging to confront his experiences and emotions head-on, as he formulates his guilt through the medium of another character.
Related Themes:
Spin
Explanation and Analysis—Feminine Care:
Because most of the events recounted in The Things They Carried take place during the Vietnam War, in which American women did not have combat roles, a majority of the stories' main characters are male. Nevertheless, female characters occupy central roles throughout the collection. Both in presence and absence, women are associated with regret, youth, and caretaking. As a motif, women come to represent an alternative to—and relief from—war and masculine duty.
Important female characters frame the collection, as the first and final stories both feature decisive female characters who appear in flashback. In "The Things They Carried," Jimmy Cross longs for Martha, a girl he went on a date with before the war. He finds himself infatuated with her to the point of distraction, and blames the death of Ted Lavender on his inability to stop thinking about Martha. In "The Lives of the Dead," the narrator recounts his first relationship with Linda, who died of a brain tumor when she was a child. This was the first time he encountered death and proves to be a formative experience when he goes to war. When O'Brien thinks of Linda, he is filled with love, wonder, and regret. For both men, these female characters connect them to their youth. While Martha and Linda represent formative experiences and perception, they also represent perplexity and blind spots.
When the men mention women in a more general sense—either as a group, or as a generic figure—they are often posed as caretakers. For example, in "The Things They Carried," the narrator writes that the men at times imagined shooting their toe so they could be evacuated to Japan and "a hospital with warm beds and cute geisha nurses." When they stand guard at night, they imagine being "carried away by jumbo jets," were they would be greeted by "a smiling stewardess." As the men fantasize about escaping from the overwhelmingly masculine domain of war, feminine caretaking is one of the primary elements they conjure up to make the imagined scenario feel real and appealing.
In "Spin," O'Brien tells a story he heard from Mitchell Sanders, which gives insight into fantasies of feminine care from another angle. In this story, a guy goes AWOL and "shacks up in Danang with a Red Cross nurse." Despite having a "great time," he eventually rejoins his unit:
Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, “All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.”
Although O'Brien is sure that Sanders made most of it up, he thinks that this story effectively shows how addictive war can be. The story also suggests that feminine care—as epitomized by the nurse—is most appealing as an unattainable ideal. Moreover, the story accentuates the traditional dichotomy of feminine passivity and masculine action, suggesting that these characteristics are complementary yet incompatible.
Although women did not participate in combat in Vietnam, The Things They Carried does include a female fighter. Mary Anne, who appears in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," is the most developed female character of the whole collection. However, she also comes to be a complex character, especially as it relates to her gender expression. One of the story's main premises is that Mary Anne stops behaving in typically feminine ways—and gives up her traditional life plan—after she comes to Vietnam. For Rat Kiley, who tells the story, Mary Anne is proof that, even in war, being a girl doesn't "amount to jack." She learned just as quickly as any of the men.
Related Themes:
How to Tell a True War Story
Explanation and Analysis—Writing Process:
In The Things They Carried, the reader frequently receives the narrator's meta-commentary on his storytelling. Transparency about the writing process becomes a central motif in the story, as the narrator repeatedly comments on the composition and editing that have gone into the stories. O'Brien is evidently committed to truthful writing and believes that fabrication is occasionally necessary to maximize the truthfulness of storytelling.
In "Spin," the collection's third story, the narrator makes a number of self-reflexive comments about his composition of the story that the reader is reading. After describing a few disparate memories from the war, the narrator brings the reader to the present-day, writing that he is "forty-three years old, and a writer now." He explains that writing about his experiences from the war makes remembering turn "into a kind of rehappening." A few pages later, he defends himself from his daughter Kathleen's charge that his war stories are "an obsession," claiming that "You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present." In his opinion, stories are "for joining the past to the future."
One of the stories that contains a lot of meta-commentary is literally called "How to Tell a True War Story." In this story, the narrator emphasizes that "A true war story is never moral," claiming that there is no rectitude or virtue "whatsoever." He also emphasizes that true war stories are ones in which the narrator is not quite sure what actually happened:
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way.
This comment shows that, in certain cases, the narrator's meta-commentary undermines his own writing process. As a result, he complicates the objectivity of his narration and challenges the reader's trust in his storytelling. On the other hand, by bringing this up, he proves that he is exceptionally transparent and honest in his approach to storytelling.
Not only does O'Brien comment on storytelling to his reader, but the characters also discuss effective and ineffective storytelling techniques when they tell each other stories. For example, when Rat Kiley tells the other soldiers about Mary Anne Bell, Mitchell Sanders preempts his delivery of a certain detail, citing information from the exposition: "all that had to be there for a reason. That’s how stories work, man.” Sanders also criticizes Kiley for inserting his own analysis and personal opinions into the narration, calling it a "bad habit" and reminding him that "all that matters is the raw material." Sanders' criticism of Kiley's storytelling style is somewhat ironic, given that O'Brien himself adds such elements into the very stories that give these characters life. His self-reflexive commentary does not follow the usual rules of storytelling.
The narrator's honesty about the writing process includes divulging where his stories come from. When he tells a story that he heard from someone else, he allows the respective character to narrate it. Although O'Brien is presumably the only member of the Alpha Company who went on to publish stories about their shared experiences in Vietnam, many of the other men are storytellers. O'Brien respects the voices and perspectives of his fellow soldiers, letting them participate in his writing process as characters with stories to share. He wants his reader to know where his stories come from and to recognize the immense complexity of transforming the "raw material" of memories into a published text.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Music:
In a few of the stories in The Things They Carried, music has a negative connotation. Associated with mystery, danger, and the unknown, the motif of music sheds light on the soldiers' intangible, unspeakable fears. Rather than providing entertainment or relaxation, music becomes the sound of the men's unease. Music is also the sound of Vietnam—a country in which they are intruders. The motif reminds the reader that, in war, fear is a multisensory experience: one is not only horrified by what one sees, but also by what one hears, smells, and feels.
In "How to Tell a True War Story," the narrator recounts a story he heard from Mitchell Sanders about a six-man patrol that goes into the mountains on "a basic listening-post operation." They're supposed to maintain "absolute silence" and be "all ears."
So after a couple days the guys start hearing this real soft, kind of wacked-out music. Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks. [...] So they listen. And every night they keep hearing that crazyass gook concert. All kinds of chimes and xylophones.
Sanders goes on to explain that the six men heard music of an increasingly unlikely nature, such as sounds from a cocktail party, chamber music, and an opera. Eventually, the men can't take the music anymore and call in air strikes. Over the course of the story, the music in the mountains becomes a form of eerie, all-consuming torture. Music does not offer the men comfort, but drives them mad.
Haunting music also plays a role in Rat Kiley's story about Mary Anne Bell in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." As Mark Fossie waits for Mary Anne outside of the Special Forces hootch, Kiley and Diamond go check on him. There is music playing "out in the dark":
Not loud but not soft either. It had a chaotic, almost unmusical sound, without rhythm or form or progression, like the noise of nature. A synthesizer, it seemed, or maybe an electric organ. In the background, just audible, a woman’s voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue.
Like in Sanders' story, the music is posed as a part of the landscape, seemingly emanating from nature. Later, Kiley says that it's as though the music comes from "the earth itself, from the deep rain forest." According to Kiley, Fossie stands there swaying to the music, as though hypnotized by it. He repeatedly tells the men to listen, emphasizing that it's Mary Anne's voice, all while the chanting becomes louder, fiercer, and higher pitched. Even if the voice is recognizable, the words are incomprehensible—"in a language beyond translation." It's not clear what the actual source of this music is or how real or imagined it is. Sanders's story has an air of magical realism to it, but the reader is meant to feel confused and untethered, just as the soldiers do when they hear these strange sounds outside at night.
O'Brien again describes musical sounds triggering fear and discomfort in "Night Life." In this story, Sanders explains why everyone—but especially Kiley—begins to feel off. A key aspects of their shared discomfort is the sounds of the night.
You’d hear a strange hum in your ears. Nothing specific; nothing you could put a name on. Tree frogs, maybe, or snakes or flying squirrels or who-knew-what. Like the night had its own voice—that hum in your ears—and in the hours after midnight you’d swear you were walking through some kind of soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh.
Again, the sound of nature is likened to voice, and the music is associated with Vietnam and nature itself. The hum seems to accentuate the darkness, making the men lose their grip on reality.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Into the Light:
In a few of the stories in The Things They Carried, the narrator dwells on the moment just before someone is killed. Two such instances involve the given person stepping out of shade or fog and into the light, before evaporating or being lifted up. Developed alongside visual imagery, the transition from darkness to light—and, in parallel, life to death—becomes a motif in the collection. Although there's technically nothing supernatural going on, the force of the weapons that kill the men is described in almost magical terms. Additionally, O'Brien makes it seem as though time slows down, or even stops.
The narrator first brings up Curt Lemon in the collection's third story, "Spin." Although he develops the character in further detail later, he already tells the reader how Lemon dies in this story: "Curt Lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree." From this short sentence, it's clear that Lemon's death is a rich, visual experience for O'Brien. To retain, retrieve, and recount the experience, he clings to specific visual imagery, such as the shade, the sunlight, and Lemon's face.
The narrator repeats these details in "How to Tell a True War Story," which reinforces the reader's impression that O'Brien is keenly fascinated with the visual absurdity of the memory. As he recounts Lemon's death in greater detail, he takes care to set up the scene with substantial imagery: on a nature hike, the men take a break in the shade of giant trees, "quadruple canopy, no sunlight at all," surrounded by mountains. He writes that everything is quiet, which removes the focus from the auditory level of the imagery, in favor of the visual:
There was a noise, I suppose, which must’ve been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.
In this passage, the narrator repeats some of the diction he already used in "Spin." He also adds more to the scene, dragging it out and giving the reader a more complete picture. Although it is the smoke grenade that sends his body parts into the tree, it looks as though the sunlight is what lifts him up. Later, he writes that Lemon "must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him."
O'Brien clings to similar visual details when he processes killing a man in "Ambush." Once again, there's "no sound at all" leading up to the moment. As he kneels in the brush, he sees a "young man come out of the fog." O'Brien throws a grenade to make him "just evaporate." Like for Lemon, leaving the fog seems fatal—stepping into the light is tantamount to stepping into death. While darkness often has a negative connotation in the collection, this motif indicates that darkness, fog, and shade can be safer in war, as they provide valuable cover.
The narrator's memories of these two moments point to the incomprehensibility of death and how surreal it is to watch someone die. Because O'Brien struggles to wrap his head around dying and killing as it happens in the moment, these two memories became enduring visual spectacles for him. Removed from the actual events unfolding in front of him, he sees death not as death—but as being lifted up or evaporating.
Related Themes:
Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
Explanation and Analysis—Music:
In a few of the stories in The Things They Carried, music has a negative connotation. Associated with mystery, danger, and the unknown, the motif of music sheds light on the soldiers' intangible, unspeakable fears. Rather than providing entertainment or relaxation, music becomes the sound of the men's unease. Music is also the sound of Vietnam—a country in which they are intruders. The motif reminds the reader that, in war, fear is a multisensory experience: one is not only horrified by what one sees, but also by what one hears, smells, and feels.
In "How to Tell a True War Story," the narrator recounts a story he heard from Mitchell Sanders about a six-man patrol that goes into the mountains on "a basic listening-post operation." They're supposed to maintain "absolute silence" and be "all ears."
So after a couple days the guys start hearing this real soft, kind of wacked-out music. Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks. [...] So they listen. And every night they keep hearing that crazyass gook concert. All kinds of chimes and xylophones.
Sanders goes on to explain that the six men heard music of an increasingly unlikely nature, such as sounds from a cocktail party, chamber music, and an opera. Eventually, the men can't take the music anymore and call in air strikes. Over the course of the story, the music in the mountains becomes a form of eerie, all-consuming torture. Music does not offer the men comfort, but drives them mad.
Haunting music also plays a role in Rat Kiley's story about Mary Anne Bell in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." As Mark Fossie waits for Mary Anne outside of the Special Forces hootch, Kiley and Diamond go check on him. There is music playing "out in the dark":
Not loud but not soft either. It had a chaotic, almost unmusical sound, without rhythm or form or progression, like the noise of nature. A synthesizer, it seemed, or maybe an electric organ. In the background, just audible, a woman’s voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue.
Like in Sanders' story, the music is posed as a part of the landscape, seemingly emanating from nature. Later, Kiley says that it's as though the music comes from "the earth itself, from the deep rain forest." According to Kiley, Fossie stands there swaying to the music, as though hypnotized by it. He repeatedly tells the men to listen, emphasizing that it's Mary Anne's voice, all while the chanting becomes louder, fiercer, and higher pitched. Even if the voice is recognizable, the words are incomprehensible—"in a language beyond translation." It's not clear what the actual source of this music is or how real or imagined it is. Sanders's story has an air of magical realism to it, but the reader is meant to feel confused and untethered, just as the soldiers do when they hear these strange sounds outside at night.
O'Brien again describes musical sounds triggering fear and discomfort in "Night Life." In this story, Sanders explains why everyone—but especially Kiley—begins to feel off. A key aspects of their shared discomfort is the sounds of the night.
You’d hear a strange hum in your ears. Nothing specific; nothing you could put a name on. Tree frogs, maybe, or snakes or flying squirrels or who-knew-what. Like the night had its own voice—that hum in your ears—and in the hours after midnight you’d swear you were walking through some kind of soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh.
Again, the sound of nature is likened to voice, and the music is associated with Vietnam and nature itself. The hum seems to accentuate the darkness, making the men lose their grip on reality.
Related Themes:
Notes
Explanation and Analysis—Masks of Composure:
At multiple points in The Things They Carried, the narrator discusses the soldiers' fear of showing fear. He sums this up in the collection's first and titular story: "They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it." The motif of masculine dignity shows up repeatedly throughout the work, as the men mask their vulnerability with toughness. Often, conversations unravel into simple jokes when they are on the verge of turning into heart-to-hearts.
In "The Things They Carried," the narrator writes that cowardice is one of the heaviest things that the soldiers carry. As a result, the soldiers carry themselves with what the narrator calls "masks of composure":
They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
In this heart-wrenching passage, O'Brien sums up something that often brings people into war: the fear of admitting that one is scared to fight and the fear of dishonor. These fears are linked with masculinity, as society has not traditionally allowed men to reveal their emotions—particularly ones of a vulnerable nature.
Throughout the stories in the collection, the men's masks of composure often result in an inability to express themselves candidly. In "Notes," when the narrator recounts receiving a letter from Norman Bowker after the war, he describes that the letter was tonally all over the place. In the years after the war, Bowker still—or perhaps more than ever— found it difficult to express his emotions about what he lived through. He asserts that veterans who express their grievances is one thing he "really [hates]":
The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know what to feel. In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much:
God, this is starting to sound like some jerkoff vet crying in his beer. Sorry about that. I’m no basket case—not even any bad dreams. [...] But I shouldn’t bitch. One thing I hate—really hate—is all those whiner-vets.
Bowker's metaphorical mask of composure seems to extend to his mouth, as it prevents him from telling people in his hometown about his experiences in the war. This is what the story "Speaking of Courage" is about. Driving in circles around the town and feeling increasingly alienated, Bowker thinks about the war story he would have told his high school sweetheart or father if it were "a good time to talk." He feels, however, that it's never a good time: "There was nothing to say. He could not talk about it and never would." A few years after the war, Bowker takes his own life.
In "Notes," the narrator reveals that he has collapsed his own story about the night Kiowa died with that of Bowker. This shows to the reader that O'Brien also finds it challenging to confront his experiences and emotions head-on, as he formulates his guilt through the medium of another character.
Related Themes:
The Ghost Soldiers
Explanation and Analysis—Stage Presence:
Throughout The Things They Carried, the soldiers in Alpha Company—all of whom are men in their late teens and early twenties—banter and joke to introduce levity into difficult situations. The idea of war as a comedy show becomes a motif, as the soldiers repeatedly play with language to emphasize that they are unfazed by the violence and suffering they witness and participate in. As the men joke around, O'Brien suggests that performance is central to gender expression—and that performed masculinity is central to war.
The motif of comedic performance is introduced in the first story, "The Things They Carried." On April 16, Lee Strunk is randomly chosen to search a tunnel in Than Khe. The suspense of the narration at first seems to be a false alarm, as Lee Strunk makes it out of the tunnel unharmed. As the men make dark jokes about Strunk coming "right out of the grave," being a "fuckin' zombie," and belonging to "spook city," Lee Strunk makes a "funny ghost sound" and Ted Lavender is shot in the head. Many of the stories' most serious moments feature a similar pairing of lighthearted, boyish joking with the utmost seriousness.
O'Brien encapsulates this tendency toward the end of the first story:
They found jokes to tell.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy.
In this passage, the narrator explains that the men's jokes and do not come from cynicism or indifference, but rather that it is sensitivity that sparks their "hard language." It's easier for the men to express themselves euphemistically, because indirect language gives them a certain measure of distance from difficult experiences. Treating the war as a stage and their participation in it as "stage presence" makes it easier to bear. When the narrator explains that they feel like "actors," and that everything they do feels "scripted," he reminds the reader that many of the men sent to Vietnam had no desire to participate in the war.
The narrator addresses this again in "The Ghost Soldiers." When he gets back at Bobby Jorgenson for not treating him for shock, he describes the force that takes over his body, likening it to being an actor in a movie:
It’s as if you’re in a movie. There’s a camera on you, so you begin acting, you’re somebody else. You think of all the films you’ve seen, Audie Murphy and Gary Cooper and the Cisco Kid, all those heroes, and you can’t help falling back on them as models of proper comportment.
When they behave like comedians and actors, the soldiers use the feeling of performance to distance themselves from their actions, experiences, and surroundings. However, the narrator does suggest that jokes and performance aren't always possible. For example, when they find Kiowa's body in "In the Field," Bowker asks Azar "So where's the joke?" Even if Azar has been making a steady stream of jokes until this point, he becomes unable to joke: "No joke." Additionally, O'Brien points out that while it was possible to "[make] jokes" about ghosts in the daylight, "you turned into a believer" at night. The death of friends and pitch darkness wipe away the men's stage presence, as they have no choice but to stare gravity in the face.
Related Themes:
Night Life
Explanation and Analysis—Music:
In a few of the stories in The Things They Carried, music has a negative connotation. Associated with mystery, danger, and the unknown, the motif of music sheds light on the soldiers' intangible, unspeakable fears. Rather than providing entertainment or relaxation, music becomes the sound of the men's unease. Music is also the sound of Vietnam—a country in which they are intruders. The motif reminds the reader that, in war, fear is a multisensory experience: one is not only horrified by what one sees, but also by what one hears, smells, and feels.
In "How to Tell a True War Story," the narrator recounts a story he heard from Mitchell Sanders about a six-man patrol that goes into the mountains on "a basic listening-post operation." They're supposed to maintain "absolute silence" and be "all ears."
So after a couple days the guys start hearing this real soft, kind of wacked-out music. Weird echoes and stuff. Like a radio or something, but it’s not a radio, it’s this strange gook music that comes right out of the rocks. [...] So they listen. And every night they keep hearing that crazyass gook concert. All kinds of chimes and xylophones.
Sanders goes on to explain that the six men heard music of an increasingly unlikely nature, such as sounds from a cocktail party, chamber music, and an opera. Eventually, the men can't take the music anymore and call in air strikes. Over the course of the story, the music in the mountains becomes a form of eerie, all-consuming torture. Music does not offer the men comfort, but drives them mad.
Haunting music also plays a role in Rat Kiley's story about Mary Anne Bell in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." As Mark Fossie waits for Mary Anne outside of the Special Forces hootch, Kiley and Diamond go check on him. There is music playing "out in the dark":
Not loud but not soft either. It had a chaotic, almost unmusical sound, without rhythm or form or progression, like the noise of nature. A synthesizer, it seemed, or maybe an electric organ. In the background, just audible, a woman’s voice was half singing, half chanting, but the lyrics seemed to be in a foreign tongue.
Like in Sanders' story, the music is posed as a part of the landscape, seemingly emanating from nature. Later, Kiley says that it's as though the music comes from "the earth itself, from the deep rain forest." According to Kiley, Fossie stands there swaying to the music, as though hypnotized by it. He repeatedly tells the men to listen, emphasizing that it's Mary Anne's voice, all while the chanting becomes louder, fiercer, and higher pitched. Even if the voice is recognizable, the words are incomprehensible—"in a language beyond translation." It's not clear what the actual source of this music is or how real or imagined it is. Sanders's story has an air of magical realism to it, but the reader is meant to feel confused and untethered, just as the soldiers do when they hear these strange sounds outside at night.
O'Brien again describes musical sounds triggering fear and discomfort in "Night Life." In this story, Sanders explains why everyone—but especially Kiley—begins to feel off. A key aspects of their shared discomfort is the sounds of the night.
You’d hear a strange hum in your ears. Nothing specific; nothing you could put a name on. Tree frogs, maybe, or snakes or flying squirrels or who-knew-what. Like the night had its own voice—that hum in your ears—and in the hours after midnight you’d swear you were walking through some kind of soft black protoplasm, Vietnam, the blood and the flesh.
Again, the sound of nature is likened to voice, and the music is associated with Vietnam and nature itself. The hum seems to accentuate the darkness, making the men lose their grip on reality.
Related Themes:
