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Explanation and Analysis—O'Briens Trustworthiness:
At several points in The Things They Carried, the narrator casts doubt on the objectivity and trustworthiness of his own narration. He contradicts himself, admits to fabricating portions of his stories, and claims that language is not sufficient for expressing what he has experienced and witnessed. Ironically, by making himself an unreliable narrator, O'Brien wins the reader's trust to a greater degree, as he openly addresses many of the challenges involved in narration—and attempts to make up for them, while still respecting the value of storytelling.
Over the course of the collection, the narrator's role, presence, and participation vary with the stories. He mostly keeps up a consistent tone, but the degree to which he comments on his own role as narrator fluctuates substantially. While the first story makes it seem like the narrator is omniscient, or at least that he doesn't know any of the soldiers personally, the opening sentence of the second story dispels this impression immediately:
Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried through our lives.
In "The Things They Carried," he refers to the soldiers entirely in the third person, never using the first person. In "Love," on the other hand, he makes it clear that he is one of the soldiers who took part in carrying "all the things." The memories the narrator recounts in the first story are his own.
At the end of "Love," Cross makes O'Brien promise not to write "anything about—." Redacting what Cross says, O'Brien signals to the reader that he will not tell everything—he has secrets to keep. In a way, though, this adds to his trustworthiness, as it shows that he remains loyal to his fellow soldiers. After all, before the narration begins, O'Brien "lovingly" dedicates his book to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa. He makes it clear that he would not want his reliability as a narrator to supersede his reliability as a friend to these men.
In many of the stories in which O'Brien self-reflexively comments on his own storytelling, he seems highly preoccupied with honesty and truthfulness. Nevertheless, it is unclear whether he follows the same standards of honest, truthful narration across the whole collection. Statements he makes in some of the later stories make the reader rethink portions of narration in earlier stories. Similarly, such statements inform how the reader makes sense of later stories.
In “How to Tell a True War Story,” O'Brien admits that "you tend to miss a lot" and even claims that words are not always sufficient for capturing the truth of war stories. In "Notes," he rehashes the last story, offering the reader context about its origins and earlier versions. Explaining how he ended up with the story the reader just read, he admits that telling stories requires pinning "down certain truths" and "[making] up others." To "carry forward" an incident that "truly happened," one has to invent incidents that "did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain." At the end of the story, he offers an extreme example of this process: Bowker was not actually the soldier who neglected to save Kiowa—it was O'Brien himself.
Related Themes:
