In Timothy O'Brien's novel, The Things They Carried, a number of insightful
themes are forwarded by the author. One theme in particular interests me the
most; the subject area is how people handle their emotions through the avoidance
or distortion of reality. Specifically, throughout the novel a number of
characters respond to the emotionally charged realities they are confronted with
in one of two major ways, distortion or escapism. This pattern, shown throughout
the novel, surveys one manner in which humans approach the rough emotions they
carry with them throughout their life. To support this thesis I will analyze a
number of character's responses to emotional stressors and compare them against
my claims of escape and distortion reactions. I have identified two major ways
the characters I analyze respond to their realities in this novel, distortion
and escapism. When I identify something as distortion, I intend to imply that
the characters take the edge off of the reality of their situations by making
the events they encounter seem less real. Examples of such behavior would
include finding humor in otherwise horrifying situations or even romanticizing
the environment around them to make it seem something different than what it is.
The escapist manner of reacting to the intensity of emotions is to distance
oneself from the actual events or surrounding. To accomplish this all a
character needs to do is to daydream themselves away from the problem or to
create alternative realities in their own mind. It is important to establish
that O'Brien develops the premise that the emotions and situations these men had
to deal with were very intense and traumatic. Beyond the more or less obvious
contention that dealing with death and war might be painful, there is textual
support that O'Brien is trying to get this message across. On page 20, the
narrator says, "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might
die. Grief, terror, love, longing-these were intangibles, but the intangibles
had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight." This
analysis sets up textual basis for my theme. If it is true that these soldiers
experience (d) tremendous emotions then there is room to analyze how they go
about carrying their tangible "emotional baggage." Additionally, it
should be noted that the characters I analyze in this paper are only a small
representative sample of the larger number of characters who may very well fit
my within my thesis statement. It is also noteworthy to mention that how I
classify a character in terms of their response to emotional intensity-escape or
distortion-is very much a debatable contention. Given that, I do believe,
however, that my conclusions will stand on the merit of my analysis. In the
first chapter, Timothy O'Brien wastes no time examining one coping mechanism,
escapism. Escapism is a rather basic way of handling intense emotions. Timothy
O'Brien first introduces a character named Lieutenant Jimmy Cross who exhibits
the escapist manner of dealing with his emotions. Jimmy Cross is the Lieutenant
of the group of men that this story focuses on. Jimmy Cross is first introduced
fantasizing about his love, a girl name Martha. Martha is a student back home in
New Jersey and for all intents and purposes does not return Lieutenant Cross's
love. On pages 3 and 4, the narrator comments that, "They [the letters]
were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a
way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant."
Thus, despite the fact that Lieutenant Cross acknowledges that Martha probably
does not return his love, he still daydreams about falling in love with Martha
and the times they spent together before the war. The somewhat excessive, so it
seems to the reader, amount of time Jimmy Cross spends thinking about Martha may
indeed be a failure of reading. We ask ourselves why it is that Jimmy Cross
spends so much time thinking about Martha? This and other similar questions
about the daydreaming provide room for interpretation. This daydreaming of
Martha is a way of escaping the intensity of emotion Jimmy Cross has to bear
during the war. We find out that in the week before Ted Lavender dies Jimmy
Cross daydreams a great deal about Martha. This daydreaming helps to take him
away from the intensity of the war. On pages 9 and 10 the narrator describes how
Lieutenant Cross would walk along his missions thinking about spending time with
Martha. While on tour, Lieutenant Cross once received a pebble in a letter from
Martha. This inspired him to daydream about how she must have kept it in her
breast. He escaped to the beach where she found the pebble and vividly thought
about the waves crashing upon the beach of the Jersey shoreline. The narrator
identifies how distracting this daydreaming is when he says, "He [Jimmy
Cross] had difficulty keeping his attention on the war" (9-10). The
daydreaming about Martha is a way that Cross took himself completely away from
the war. He could be thousands of miles away on a quiet beach in Jersey as the
war raged on around him. Another character who demonstrates escapism is our
child of the Song Tra Bong, Mary Anne. This act of escape is slightly more
radical than Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's response, however. The chapter, "The
Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," allows the reader a chance to evaluate a
more extreme reaction to the emotions of war. The story of Mary Anne begins with
her boyfriend who is part of a small medical regiment located along a river,
called the Song Tra Bong. Rat Kiley is the narrator of the story; he was also a
part of this regiment, along with Mary Anne's boyfriend, Mark Fossie. Rat Kiley
explains how Mark Fossie arranged to have his girlfriend brought over to
Vietnam, so they could be together. Marry Anne comes over to Vietnam and is
delivered to the medical outpost by way of supplies chopper. Mary Anne is
depicted by O'Brien to be very innocent. She is described as a soft, curious,
and friendly person adorned in her pink sweater. The feminine elements are
stressed in the description of her in order to juxtapose her against the
harsher, more masculine, surroundings. It is this dissimilarity, between Mary
Anne's serenity and the war's roughness, which allows us to see how fully the
war could force a person to confront an uncomfortable reality. As the story
progresses Mary Anne begins to change from her bubbly and alive pink sweater
persona into a more withdrawn individual. On page 109, Rat Kiley describes,
"The way she quickly fell into the habits of the bush. No cosmetics, no
fingernail filing. She stopped wearing jewelry, cut her hair short and wrapped
it in a dark green bandana." A noticeable point of departure is when Mary
Anne begins to spend more and more time with the Green Berets and even goes on
an ambush with them. After going on the ambush Mary Anne is remarkably
withdrawn. Despite that she temporarily seems to get "straightened
out" by her boyfriend and ends up wearing a nice blue dress and has groomed
hair the next day, she is still distinctly different than before. As Rat Kiley
notes on page 113, "Over dinner she kept her eyes down, poking at her food,
subdued to the point of silence." Questions run through the reader's mind
at this point. What did she see out there? What does she feel? Why is she acting
like this? These questions signify a failure of reading. They force us to wonder
what to make of Mary Anne's character change and her reactions. The remainder of
the story of Mary Anne brings us to her eventual departure into the jungle. Not
on a mission with the Green Berets, but alone. She simply disappears. If we
conjecture that while on their missions the Green Berets ambushed and killed
people, then it is reasonable to assume that Mary Anne experienced and witnessed
killing. Perhaps, the horror of such acts forced her to run. The intense
emotions that the war produces within simply got to her. Her reaction was to
escape. She escaped from a world in which she had to deal with the emotions into
a world in which she let herself be consumed by them. These two examples support
the idea that when confronted with great emotional shock people desperately try
to avoid the reality of their situation. Alas, escape is not the only way
Timothy O'Brien develops this theme. Another way to respond to the reality of a
situation wrought with emotional dismay is to distort that reality. What does it
mean to distort reality? It means to make reality seem not what it is. To alter
how one views the situation. To take the edge off realities harshness. To dull
the otherwise piercing emotional intensity. There are a couple of significant
examples of reality distortion that I will identify. The first example is the
use of humor in otherwise horrifying situations in order to make the situation
less real. After Ted Lavender dies the men in his company make fun of the
circumstances of his death. Ted Lavender was urinating while he was shot and he
also happened to be doped up at the time. It is important to note that Ted
Lavender used tranquilizers in abnormally large amounts. They made jokes about
his death. Mitchell Sanders provides a specific example of this behavior.
Shortly after Lavender's death Sanders made a joke that "The moral's pretty
obvious. Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they'll ruin
your day every time" (20). The narrator says the men even joked about how
"poor guy didn't even feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was"
(20). The joking about death is a failure of reading. We might ask ourselves why
would people joke about such issues? Do they have no emotions? It is when we ask
these questions that we see yet another instance of reality avoidance in the
novel. These men are not emotionless; on the contrary, they are so filled with
internal emotional conflict that their joking is a way of responding to the
reality they are faced with, the death of a friend and fellow soldier. The
narrator says on page 19, "They were afraid of dying but they were even
more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to
contain the terrible softness." This quotation captures very accurately the
idea that some people respond to intense emotion through humor. This is yet
another method of reality avoidance in emotionally intense situations. The final
example I will analyze is in regards to the story of Norman Bowker. This story
is a good example of the distortion that often occurs when people are working
through emotionally taxing situations. Norman Bowker is a member of the company
that Timothy O'Brien was in during Vietnam. After the war, Norman Bowker
returned home to his quiet hometown of Des Moines. The story revolves around
Norman Bowker driving around the town. Specifically, Norman drives around a lake
near Sunset Park. In this story Bowker thinks to himself about his life and how
things might have been different if he had not gone to the war. After a while,
it becomes apparent the Bowker keeps imaging conversations he would have with
people given different circumstances. One such conversation is what he might
have said to people if he had received the silver medal of courage. In
particular, he imagines what the conversation with his father would have been
like. Then again, he creates a number of conversations with his former
heartthrob, Sally. At one point in the story Bowker attempts to speak his story
or his mind to the person over the intercom at A&W. Even then he cannot
bring himself to talk about. The narrator on page 172 tells us that "He
could not talk about it and never would." This inability to talk about the
war and, moreover, the made up conversations, are grounds for interpretation.
The ending of this story suggests that Norman Bowker had some deeply held
emotional problems he needed to deal with. This claim has warrant because at the
end of this story Norman Bowker kills himself. Keep in mind the thesis; people
distort their reality when confronted with extreme emotional conflict. Given
that, we can now make some sense of the conversations Norman Bowker fantasizes
about. Quite simply, Norman Bowker is experiencing readjustment problems and
cannot cope with his sadness. So, he distorts his silent reality, in which he
cannot bring himself to speak to anyone, by creating made up conversations with
people. These conversations serve as a coping device for his emotions, which are
otherwise kept bottled up. The repetition of different characters avoiding the
very real and emotionally difficult situations they encounter suggests something
larger about people. The war, as the backdrop for The Things They Carried,
provides Timothy O'Brien with the cause for emotional conflict in his
characters. From this starting point the novel becomes quite a valuable document
for examining how people deal with their emotional baggage. The repetitive
avoidance through either escapism or distortion is an insight this novel gives
us about people at large. As said on page 21, "By and large they carried
these things inside, maintaining the masks of composure." Given this
observation, it might be said that some people wear masks that alter their
perception of reality and others wear masks that give them flight.