Touched With Fire
In this unit of the class we will be reading The Things they Carried, one of the most acclaimed pieces of writing about the Vietnam War. Author Tim O’Brien served in a combat unit in Vietnam for a year in 1969-70, earning a Purple Heart for the shrapnel wound he received in a grenade attack. Twenty years later he wrote a book about Vietnam that looks like a memoir of his experiences, but that is really something more.The back cover of The Things They Carried describes the Vietnam war as “a nightmarish war that history is only beginning to absorb.” The novel itself can be seen as an attempt to begin that process of absorption, an attempt to process or express something that is in a very real sense inexpressible.
In a course like this one, that is focused on the techniques and uses of language, such an attempt gives rise to an interesting question: what are the limits of writing? Is it possible to make sense of the senseless, to communicate that which cannot be communicated? O’Brien’s fascinating response seems to suggest that it will require a new form, a new method: the old rules of traditional prose must be abandoned just as the old rules for life had to be abandoned to live as a soldier in Vietnam. The Things They Carried can be thought of as a novel made up of short stories. This reading guide divides the book into four thematic parts. The divisions are not intended to suggest any particular structure intended by O'Brien, but rather to reflect the ways the themes and issues he raises resonate across multiple stories. |