This post is to introduce our study of The Things They Carried. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is is a powerful memoir in the form of a collection of short stories about the haunting life of Tim O’Brien and a company of soldiers in Vietnam. This sequence of stories also has the unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. It aims to summarise America’s involvement in Vietnam and how it came to terms with that experience in the years that followed.
O’Brien’s has used an unconventional choice of form in The Things They Carried. It consists of short stories published separately over nearly a decade, but reworked, reordered, and bound together with various additions.
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