The things they carried

In “The Things They Carried”, I found it difficult to comprehend if there was a duality in the purpose of this novel. O’Brien writes “A true war story is never moral. It doesn't instruct nor encourage virtue nor suggest models of proper human behavior nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral don’t believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste then you've been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.” I found this line to be very heavy to the rest of the novel that was written afterwards as I could not distinguish if a selection of text had a purpose behind it but as I tried to believe it, or maybe I was just compelled due to the pathos he set up or ethos as a soldier, I felt the significance behind each story as a means to convey experiences of confusion.

When narrating the story of Jensen and Strunk, I felt the significance was the mentality behind each of the men. The necessity to steal and be wronged by the theft, though through the chapter “The things they carried” the knife held meaning as every article and item held meaning to the men, led to the results of the chapter. Despite Jensen’s fear and Strunk’s pacifistic stance regarding the beating, the two men end up being friends and with Strunk’s death on the flight, Jensen’s duty is relieved – his relief ironic of the title “Friends.” Despite being enemies they understood a code of conduct, just or not, and despite being friends, they showed little sympathy at the state of the other.

“I survived but it was not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.” O’Brien’s desire to avoid the war and yet be compelled to fight shows a chain of causality. He runs to Canada, befriends an elderly man, and yet in the end, the weight of his consciousness only comes crashing down. Even after the war, he discusses his relative ease in adjusting to graduate school. The significance of this story deals with our consciousness – what it forced him to join, what it forced him to fight, and how it forced him to move on. The story lacked a moral ending and yet even now I cannot vouch entirely for the validity of this war story after all his adamant disposition against the war and being twenty yards to freedom, yet conforming to the standards of his hometown, seems a so unbelievable human that it could be well made to describe that sense of wartime virtue that so many story give off.