“The burden of being alive”: A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried

96 Pages·2010·0.44 MB·English

by  Van De Voorde

Ghent University
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy

“The burden of being alive”
A Trauma-Theoretical Reading of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Supervisor Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of
Dr. Stef Craps the requirements for the degree of ―Licentiaat
in de Taal- en Letterkunde: Germaanse Talen‖
by Eline Van de Voorde

May, 2007
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 3
Introduction 4
Chapter 1: What is Trauma? 6
Chapter 2: Reactions to Trauma in The Things They Carried 17
Chapter 3: O‘Brien Illustrates the Isolation of the Veteran 28
Chapter 4: Recovery and Testimony 37
Chapter 5: Creating Confusion 52
Chapter 6: Telling a True War Story 62
Chapter 7: Style and the Use of Metaphor 80
Conclusion 90
Works Consulted 92

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Acknowledgments

This dissertation could not have been realized without the support and the encouragement
from a lot of people. I am grateful for the corrections and guidelines my supervisor Dr. Stef
Craps has given me, and also for showing me where to look for the right sources. I also want
to thank my friends and family for their encouragement and their critical reading of my
dissertation.
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Introduction

Before giving an outline of my dissertation I want to give some information about the novel
The Things They Carried by Tim O‘Brien. The novel consists of twenty-two short stories that
were first published in magazines and Tim O‘Brien incorporated and changed the stories in
the book. He often changes the stories of his novels in new editions and there is a difference
between the paperback and hardback versions. I have read a paperback version of The Things
They Carried published by Flamingo, so the version I read may differ slightly from other
versions of the book. Although the novel is made up of different short stories that can be read
separately as they were published at first in magazines, the book is not just a collection of
short stories. Every story is connected to the other stories and to fully understand the novel we
have to compare the events that are described in the different stories. The short stories of the
novel are told by the narrator-protagonist, who is called Tim O‘Brien. He reflects on his
experiences with his platoon during the Vietnam War. The different members of the platoon
are: Tim O‘Brien; Kiowa; Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, the platoon leader; Bob ―Rat‖ Kiley, a
medic; Norman Bowker; Henry Dobbins; Mitchell Sanders; Curt Lemon; Azar; Dave Jensen:
Lee Strunk; Bobby Jorgenson, the replacement medic for Rat Kiley. When I quote The Things
They Carried in my text I will indicate the source with ‗TTTC‘ to make it recognizable. For
the title of my dissertation I have taken a quotation, ―the burden of being alive‖, from The
Things They Carried page 16. With this dissertation I will try to establish a link between the
theory of trauma and the novel The Things They Carried. I have chosen this subject because I
am interested in literature and psychology. It will be interesting to see how this novel reflects
on the Vietnam War, and how it is situated in the trauma theory, and to which extent the
author bases his work on his own experiences. In the first chapter I will look at a definition
and some symptoms of trauma. The definitions and the symptoms will be tested against the
stories of The Things They Carried. I will try to establish which elements of trauma are
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present in the novel and look at how the author incorporates them in his novel. In the second
chapter I will focus on three characters of the novel, namely Norman Bowker, Tim O‘Brien
and Jimmy Cross. They each deal with and react to trauma in their own way. These three
different ways of reacting will be tested against the theories of possible ways to react to
trauma. In the third chapter I will look at what the effects are of the traumas of the Vietnam
War. I will try to prove that the Vietnam War has an isolating effect on the characters in the
story and that they do not see a justification of their actions in Vietnam. This causes an
enormous sense of alienation and it becomes clear that those who do not have support from
friends and family will not be reintegrated in society. In chapter 4 I will explain how a trauma
survivor has to regain control over his life and recover from the traumatic experience. The
element of testimony is very important in that phase and I will focus on how O‘Brien tells his
story and what are essential features of a trauma story. Because telling a story is a form of
witnessing I will further expand on the different kinds of witnesses and the different levels of
witnessing in a traumatic event. The theory of witnessing will be applied to the novel. In the
following chapter, chapter 5, I want to show how Tim O‘Brien creates confusion about the
content of his stories. I will show that some elements of the story are based on reality and the
author tries to increase the believability of his stories only to break it down. In chapter 6 the
aim is to show how O‘Brien imitates the insecurity and unknowability of a traumatic event. I
will use the example of the section ―How To Tell a True War Story‖ which shows how a true
war story, and also a trauma story should be written according to the narrator. In the final
chapter I will try to give some examples of style that are used in the novel. I will try to prove
that the author is very conscious about his style and I want to find out if the style of the novel
mimics the traumatic experience.
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Chapter 1: What is Trauma?

The Things They Carried is a literary description of the traumatic experiences of combat
soldiers during the Vietnam war. If we want to understand The Things They Carried, we need
to look at the theory of trauma. O‘Brien uses trauma as a medium in his book, but also as an
important theme. The title of the book already introduces the theme of trauma. The narrator
talks about the things soldiers have to carry with them during the war, ―the things‖ in the two
senses of the word, literally and figuratively, their physical and mental burden. In the first
story of the novel ―The Things They Carried‖ the narrator gives a description of different
objects the men carried with them, mostly weapons and food. He also describes the personal
objects certain soldiers have with them. For instance Ted Lavender‘s tranquillisers, Lieutenant
Cross‘ pictures of the girl he loves. Steven Kaplan points to the detailing of the different
objects, almost a scientific description. The academic, scientific language expresses the reality
and the certainty of the things to carry (Kaplan N. pag.). The most important and most
difficult thing they carried, was the psychological burden of the traumatic experiences of the
Vietnam War. The narrator tells: ―They shared the weight of memory. They took up what
others could no longer bear‖ (TTTC 12). The soldiers experienced horrible things: killing
people, witnessing people being killed. That shared experience of misery and guilt led them to
help each other in bearing this heavy burden. Therefore the platoon is very important for
coping with traumatic situations. The burden the soldiers have to carry seems to be the only
certainty in war. The narrator describes this as follows: ―[…] and for all the ambiguities of
Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that
they would never be at a loss for things to carry‖(TTTC 14).

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In order to analyse the trauma in The Things They Carried we need to define what trauma
exactly is. In Trauma and Recovery Judith Lewis Herman defines trauma from the finding
that when trauma emerges, the victim is in a helpless position: ―Traumatic events overwhelm
the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning‖
(Herman 33). Kalí Tal defines trauma as a ―transformative experience‖ (Worlds of Hurt 119).
The victim loses his innocence because of the trauma and he or she can never get it back (Tal,
Worlds of Hurt 119). Traumatic experiences are not uncommon. Especially soldiers are
victims of trauma. Traumatic experiences are different from other human experiences and
people react to trauma in a different way than to everyday events, because traumatic
experiences normally ―involve threats to life and bodily integrity, or a close personal
encounter with violence and death‖ (Herman 33). Traumatic events make the victim helpless,
through which he or she reacts in a certain way to the events. According to Herman a
traumatic reaction occurs, when there is no possibility of escape or resistance for the
threatened person. The traumatized person cannot respond to danger in the ordinary way. The
ordinary response to danger persists long after the danger has gone. Traumatic events cause
changes in ―physiological arousal, emotion, cognition and memory‖ (Herman 34). Traumatic
events also sever these functions, which are normally integrated, from each other. Herman‘s
conclusion is that the ―traumatized person may experience intense emotion without clear
memory of the event, or may remember everything in detail but without emotion. She may
find herself in a constant state of vigilance and irritability without knowing why. Traumatic
symptoms have a tendency to become disconnected from their source and to take on a life of
their own‖ (Herman 34).

In The Things They Carried O‘Brien gives an example of the inability to act upon the
situation at hand (TTTC 191-93). The narrator tells the story of how he was shot twice during
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the war. The second time was very traumatic for him, because a new medic, Bobby
Jorgenson, took a long time before attending to O‘Brien. Jorgenson was shocked by the
situation and could not act immediately. Only later Tim O‘Brien remembers the details of this
situation. He becomes obsessed by it and later on he plans to take revenge on the medic.
I‘d squirm around, cussing, half nuts with pain, and pretty soon I‘d start remembering how Bobby
Jorgenson had almost killed me. Shock, I‘d think – how could he forget to treat for shock? I‘d
remember how long it took him to get to me, and how his fingers were all jerky and nervous, and the
way his lips kept twitching under that ridiculous little moustache. The nights were miserable.
Sometimes I‘d roam around the base. I‘d head down to the wire and stare out at the darkness, out where
the war was, and think up ways to make Bobby Jorgensen feel exactly what I felt. I wanted to hurt him.
(TTTC 193-94)
Not being immediately helped by Jorgenson is very traumatic for O‘Brien. Feeling powerless
and helpless, for his life is in the hands of the medic, he begins to blame Jorgenson for the
fact that he was shot. The reader sees the situation differently, he understands that Jorgenson
too feels powerless in this situation, paralysed as the medic is by the horror that he is
witnessing. For him too the situation is traumatizing.

The Vietnam War was traumatic for many reasons, different from the traumatic experiences
of the Second World War for example. The enemy in Vietnam was invisible, and every
civilian could be a member of the Vietcong, i.e. an enemy:
Again and again in Vietnam novels, the protagonist/narrator emphasizes the impossibility of
distinguishing ―friendly‖ civilians from National Liberation Front partisans. The soldier‘s desire to
survive leads him to see all Vietnamese as the enemy, and to take the offensive whenever he has the
opportunity. But violence is useless when everyone is your enemy. There is simply no place to hold and
defend. (Tal, Worlds of Hurt 139)
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The American newsmagazine Time published in 1985, ten years after theVietnam War ended,
a survey of that war. Lance Morrow describes how frustrating the invisibility of the enemy
was for the soldiers.
The enemy had been invisible in an earlier part of the war, hiding in jungles, in tunnels, ghosting around
in the pre-dawn: killer shadows. They dissolved by day into the villages, into the other Vietnamese.
They maddened the Americans with the mystery of who they were – the unseen man who shot from the
tree line, or laid a wire across the trail with a Claymore mine at the other end, the mama-san who did the
wash, the child concealing a grenade. (Morrow 20)
Another reason for the traumatic complexity of the Vietnam War is the protest the war
provoked in the United States. There was a lot of protest from students and from veterans.
When soldiers came home from Vietnam they were not welcomed as heroes like the veterans
of the Second World War had been. In the eyes of a growing part of the population they had
not fought for a good cause and the greater good. For the protesters there had been no purpose
to this war. The antiwar movement was not the monopoly of the civilian population, the
veterans themselves protested against the war. Their protest was more painful and inflicting,
for they had fought in this war and by protesting they were forced to realize that they had
killed for no reason and that their actions during the war had been immoral. There was no
justification for the Vietnam war, and the veterans were aware of this. Kalí Tal says that the
protest of the veterans came at a great personal cost: ―Their condemnation of the American
policy in Vietnam contained an implicit criticism of their own complicity in acts of brutality
and atrocity‖ (Worlds of Hurt 129).

In 1981 Michael Maclear writes in The Ten Thousand Day War that ―a decade after the
United States had ceased combat in Vietnam, almost two-thirds of the Americans who served
there, or 1,750,000 soldiers, are officially described as in need of psychiatric counselling‖
(Maclear xiv). Heberle recognizes different traumatic symptoms in the form and style of The
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Things They Carried: ―Traumatic episodes all, their representations are fittingly marked by
fragmentation, violation of chronology, intrusiveness and repetition‖ (Heberle 196). Kalí Tal
also recognizes that fragmentation, ―drawing together fragments into a whole‖ (Tal, Worlds
of Hurt 137) and ―re-piecing a shattered self‖(Tal, Worlds of Hurt 138), is a common feature
in the literature of trauma. In Trauma and Recovery Herman describes the different symptoms
of trauma. The author divides the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder into three
categories: ―hyperarousal‖, ―intrusion‖ and ―constriction‖ (Herman 35). Hyperarousal is
described as follows:
After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go on permanent alert, as
if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of
hyperarousal, which is the first cardinal symbol of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person
startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. (Herman, 35)

Herman quotes Roy Grinker and John Spiegel who analysed the behaviour of soldiers of the
Second World War and came to the conclusion that the subjective fear of these soldiers
declined when they were taken out of the situation of stress. However, they were not able to
have ―a life of safety and security‖ (Herman 36), because the physiological phenomena did
not go away. Several studies show ―that psychophysiological changes of post-traumatic stress
disorder are both extensive and enduring‖ (Herman 36).

Next to hyperarousal symptoms Herman distinguishes intrusive symptoms. The traumatized
patient is forced to relive the traumatic event, although this event is in the past and does not
pose a threat to the traumatized anymore. The patient has intrusive flashbacks and traumatic
nightmares. Because of the intrusive reliving of the trauma, the traumatized person cannot
have a normal development. Victims are fixated on their trauma. Herman also points out that
traumatic memories have unusual qualities: ―They are not encoded like the ordinary memories
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