The Things They Carried Reaction

Sorry this is so late! Just got back from my hometown, Lake Geneva, because I had like this family reunion, and it took a while. However - now to the assignment.

The Things They Carried, struck me as weird. You told us that it wasn't a memoir...however, I think that it is a memoir in its truest form. A memoir is about emotional truth. This book held that notion in its complete essence.

It was emotionally stirring reading about Lavender's death, the first man O'Brien killed, Kiowa (I think thats his name) being sucked into the muck, Azar joking about death, Kiley shooting himself in the foot, and O'Brien picking pieces of Lemon off of a tree. He talks about these thing that are so...emotional that it scared me. It was the way he said it, he really felt it.

The last chapter, "The Lives of the Dead" and the chapter, "The Man I Killed" are my favorite. Thats a word I don't use in the way its normally used. By favorite, I don't mean that I liked it. I in fact, hated those chapters the most. The way he talked about the dead man (how he made it seem like the person he killed had his life spread out before O'Brien like a big story book, telling him everything) was scarry. What I did like about the story is how he described the dead man. It was almost a mirror image of himself - an man with everything to gain and to lose. And the pull of a pin was the difference in their lives. They both could have been at the end of a rifle, and they both had the exact same amount of potential...but O'Brien survived,and he could contemplate why.

The story about Linda, was increasingly creepy the more he talked about her. The dead live on in our dreams - its the same thing with characters in anyone writers stories. In my stories, there are many characters, and I am able to call them up at will, seeing their details and hear them talk, just because I have an active imagination. He put this to "reanimating" the dead. Linda seemed even more real to me when she was in his dreams and dead, then when she was alive. Quiet, slight and strange, she was an odd little girl. In his dreams, she was talkative, still strange, and ...different. I love the way she describes death as being a book on a bookshelf that nobody looks at or reads. It was odd and amazing.

This book started off with a list of things soldiers carried, and ended up as a creative memoir that was incredibly stirring and was honestly one of the books that affected me. but in a bad way. I don't think i'll be reading it again.