The End.
The Things They Carried, ends with a poetic and abstract ending. I found it interesting how O'Brien chose to end a novel so heavily focused on his experience during the war with a childhood memory.
The final line was incredibly poetic and resonated with me. I was thinking over if for days after I read it and how the story took on a perspective that was outside of the war. As I thought about it, I realized that this is not only a book about war, but one of life and the human capability to change.
The final chapter of The Things They Carried flashes between two different scenes -- “paying respect” to a dead man in Vietnam and the death of O’Brien’s sweetheart.
Linda, a nine year old girl whom O’Brien loved in elementary school is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her death appears to be O’Brien’s first experience with grief and death and shows his purpose in telling these stories.
In our book group, we discussed if the stories in the book actually happened, and if the answer matters. I think that it is more of the emotional effect and larger meaning that matters more than the truth behind the events, which we will never know. O’Brien argues that the truth behind the plot events are not the most important thing to consider. When he discusses Linda's story, he says, “She’s not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name, like the man who never was. Her real name doesn't matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if im gazing into some other world . . .”
The final chapter of The Things They Carried flashes between two different scenes -- “paying respect” to a dead man in Vietnam and the death of O’Brien’s sweetheart.
Linda, a nine year old girl whom O’Brien loved in elementary school is diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her death appears to be O’Brien’s first experience with grief and death and shows his purpose in telling these stories.
In our book group, we discussed if the stories in the book actually happened, and if the answer matters. I think that it is more of the emotional effect and larger meaning that matters more than the truth behind the events, which we will never know. O’Brien argues that the truth behind the plot events are not the most important thing to consider. When he discusses Linda's story, he says, “She’s not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name, like the man who never was. Her real name doesn't matter. She was nine years old. I loved her and she died. And yet right here, in the spell of memory and imagination, I can still see her as if through ice, as if im gazing into some other world . . .”
I believe that O'Brien's purpose in writing this novel was to pay homage to the dead and to keep his memories alive in a way that he can process them. The ending and message that I took away from O'Brien's ambiguous definition of truth reminds me of a quote by Maya Angelou. She says, "People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but they will never forget the way you made them feel."
The emotional wounds that Vietnam left on O'Brien are with him constantly, and yet the novel acts as a way to process them and his new definition of self.
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