The ways in which Tim O'Brien employed narrative and structure in his novel The Things They Carried are analyzed in a paper consisting of five pages. Three sources are cited in the bibliography.
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and how characters in the narrative reacted, and so forth. In other words, they relate irrationality in a rational manner. The fiction of Tim OBrien, on the other hand, is
structured in such a way as to reflect the fractured thought processes of his characters rather then relate events in a rational chronological manner. When faced with trauma, the mind,
in order to stay sane, will act like a jackrabbit, jumping from one topic to the next in an effort to circumnavigate traumatic, painful memories that are literally more then
the mind can bear. In his novel The Things They Carried, Tim OBrien blurs the edges between fiction and reality in order to demonstrate to the reader a
vision of reality that is "more" real because it is inconsistent and, at times, incoherent. In other words, OBrien portrays the Vietnam War as psychic trauma, without the "glamour typical
of postmodernism" (Chen, 1998, p. 73). From the beginning of the novel, OBrien makes it clear that he is not concerned with relating definitive occurrence. He writes that "absolute occurrence
is irrelevant" because "a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth" (1991, p. 89). According to OBrien, something can not have happened and still be
totally true (p. 89). The sole criteria that OBrien supports for telling a "true" war story is this: "It comes down to gut instinct, A true war story, if
truly told, makes the stomach believe" (1991, p. 84). Thus far in this paper, Thing They Carried has been spoken of as a novel, but this work has also
been listed as a collection of short stories. However, while it is certainly true that some sections can stand alone as short stories, the structure of the work is integrated