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A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.
Taught everywhere??from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing??it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award… (mais)
jrgoetziii: Because The Iliad is a classic war story and The Things They Carried is not, but took a number of passages almost directly from The Iliad (one of these is the catalog in the first book, but there are many others, too). The Iliad covers significantly more range and depth, and its themes are timeless.… (mais)
The Things They Carried is an emotionally engaging novel built out of twenty-two vignettes about the Vietnam War. The stories told feel familiar to anyone who has read or seen other fictional portrayals of that war: involuntary participants who endure pointless patrols, engage in senseless acts of violence and killing, and witness and suffer ironic deaths. What separates this book from those works is its metafictional aspect, in which the real author inserts himself as a fictional Tim O'Brien, one who both relates his experiences and comments on them twenty years later.
I am not overly fond of this trick. The fictive O'Brien's presence gives the novel a confusing memoir feel and—to me—needlessly interferes with the reality of the story—an ironic criticism, given that the narrator repeatedly discusses the truth of the untrue stories both he and the soldiers in his outfit tell, going so far as to assert that "absolute occurrence [of a true war story] is irrelevant."
There is a highly effective circularity within the stories; events (particularly deaths) are referred to in one, shown in another, analyzed in a third and fourth. The imagery of Vietnam is powerful: the jungle and night (really the darkness) as living beasts, the near-mythical elusiveness of the rarely seen enemy. At the center of these images is the shit field—literally a swamp created by the merging of the fecal runoff of an unnamed village with the overflowing Song Tra Bong river. The shit field is also figuratively the morass that was the Vietnam War, and O'Brien skillfully weaves these two roles together while telling of the death of a good friend during an overnight bivouac. After several soldiers reveal their own roles in Kiowa's death, the ultimate truth revealed is that all those claiming responsibility are indeed guilty, yet simultaneously none are.
The truest parts of this novel are the Vietnam experiences and their aftermaths. The one part I felt could have been omitted without impact was the concluding story about a childhood friend dying of a brain tumor when the author is ten. But overall, The Things They Carried delivers both the fictional and real O'Brien's stated goal of providing the reader with the feeling of the war, regardless of its truth. ( )
a question, a mystery presented to the reader right away but never answered. That is, are these stories true, biographical, or purely fiction? O’Brien’s intimate narration and total immersion into the horror and wonder-filled world he was thrown into as a young man make these stories of fiction seem utterly real. This work creates a suspension of disbelief for the reader that is arguably incomparable.
Tim O’Brien visited my university while I was an undergrad and during his speech he portrayed himself and his writing with the same moral relativism and “neutrality” is all too common in contemporary America. But in the same breathe he spoke in utter disbelief of how once a High school student told him that this book was what inspired him to join the Marines. O’Brien broke down crying after that.
A good book to show your older children great writing and the horror of war. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the 'late war' or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest. -- John Ransom's Andersonville Diary
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
This book is lovingly dedicated to the men of Alpha Company, and in particular to Jimmy Cross, Norman Bowker, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Henry Dobbins, and Kiowa.
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They werre not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why.
I was a coward. I went to the war.
Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original.
"Well, right now," she said, "I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like . . . I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading."
I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him.
What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O'Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.
Taught everywhere??from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing??it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
I am not overly fond of this trick. The fictive O'Brien's presence gives the novel a confusing memoir feel and—to me—needlessly interferes with the reality of the story—an ironic criticism, given that the narrator repeatedly discusses the truth of the untrue stories both he and the soldiers in his outfit tell, going so far as to assert that "absolute occurrence [of a true war story] is irrelevant."
There is a highly effective circularity within the stories; events (particularly deaths) are referred to in one, shown in another, analyzed in a third and fourth. The imagery of Vietnam is powerful: the jungle and night (really the darkness) as living beasts, the near-mythical elusiveness of the rarely seen enemy. At the center of these images is the shit field—literally a swamp created by the merging of the fecal runoff of an unnamed village with the overflowing Song Tra Bong river. The shit field is also figuratively the morass that was the Vietnam War, and O'Brien skillfully weaves these two roles together while telling of the death of a good friend during an overnight bivouac. After several soldiers reveal their own roles in Kiowa's death, the ultimate truth revealed is that all those claiming responsibility are indeed guilty, yet simultaneously none are.
The truest parts of this novel are the Vietnam experiences and their aftermaths. The one part I felt could have been omitted without impact was the concluding story about a childhood friend dying of a brain tumor when the author is ten. But overall, The Things They Carried delivers both the fictional and real O'Brien's stated goal of providing the reader with the feeling of the war, regardless of its truth. ( )