The Art of Storytelling

Of all the novels we have read thus far, The Things They Carried continues to draw me in as I read each chapter. O'Brien's writing is so descriptive, from the minutest details of the color of an enveloped to descriptions of every day life for him and his fellow soldiers during the war. The chapter I enjoyed most was "Spin". While I was reading through the chapter, I read through the small paragraph about Ted Lavender's puppy that Azar strapped to a mine and blew up. I stopped reading at that point and just stared at the page. I felt the pain that Lavender must have felt. But in just two small paragraphs, O'Brien characterized the men of Vietnam so well. Azar says, "What's everybody so upset about? I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy" (35). They were the age we are, and some (if not most) of them were there because of the draft and not because they believed in the cause of the war. These were kids just out of high school. The small fragments of memory that O'Brien intersperses throughout the novel give so much detail and introspection into the minds of the men in Vietnam.

His adjectives are simple, yet give great detail about the scene. When talking about Ted Lavender overdoing it on tranquilizers, instead of saying he smiled, O'Brien says, "Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile" (32). I can see Ted Lavender in my mind. I can see all the stories O'Brien tells. It's such a personal type of storytelling. Besides his descriptive scene setting, O'Brien's use of "you", though used to describe how a soldier would react to a certain event, pulls the reader deeply into the novel. It's as if O'Brien is talking to the reader. He doesn't just tell a story, he tells you what a story should do and how to tell one throughout his novel about the war in Vietnam. As he says, "Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are" (36).