Death and How We Carry It.

Tim O'Brien has an interesting philosophy. He says "Stories, retold, carry the force of a legend....the story is still going out there somewhere. Huck is still going down the river, Ahab is still chasing that whale.....I'm fascinated by the fact that every time this story is read, the whole thing happens again and again and again". Here he states with finality that "The Things They Carried " is a book about telling stories. Its a book about many things, filled with emotion and the pain of living but in its essentials, the book is a story of story telling. It defines the truth that even fiction brings to us and explains how telling a story can help you survive.

It is for this reason that I believe O'Brien ends with the story of Linda. When the character O'Brien sees his first dead body in Vietnam he is unwilling to participate in the other soldier's "funeral without sadness'. We then find out that this is not the first body he has seen. Linda was a girl that he loved and she died. I want to focus for a minute on O'Brien's attention paid to words. Nick Veenhof delivers the news of Linda's death with "Your girlfriend kicked the bucket." I like O'Brien's comparison with this moment and the idea of toasting a dead man. Kicking the bucket isn't the same as being dead. Shaking hands with a dead man turns him less a dead body, more a prop. One you take the dead part out of death it's not that heavy anymore. It's a way of carrying something and making it lighter that I recognize very much.

The last chapter of "The Things They Carried" I believe, is teaching us how to carry people, carry experience, carry emotion, through story telling. Timmy deals with the death of Linda by telling himself a story where she is alive. Because stories are something that never die. People can leave your life many ways. Death being prominent among them. But I believe that you carry people around in your heart and mind. You carry their stories and they live through you. That's why story telling is such a powerful thing.