In the book The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien, he highlights the beautiful travesties of war. Specifically in the chapter “How To Tell a True War Story,” he brings to life the gruesome beauty of life, war, nature, humans, and how everything connects cosmically in a quite profound way. Tim O’Brien unleashes a new perspective on life, forcing the reader to open their third eye to life and what it means to be truly alive through his narrative style and word choice. The chapter embarks us on a numbing roller coaster. O’Brien’s writing style becomes disconnected, retelling the same memory in different ways, interrupting one to start another just to retell the first story again in a new light. Before he begins this nonlinear journey of his memories of Curt Lemon, he emphasizes what it means to tell a true war story as he writes, “A true war story is never moral… If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story, you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie… You can tell a true war story [apart] by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (65). This vignette exemplifies exactly what O’Brien’s storytelling within this chapter is supposed to tell: the uncompromising allegiance to the evil of war within life.
The story of Curt Lemon is a disconnected memory of a nineteen-year-old soldier who faced a childish death while playing a self-invented game with another soldier, Rat Kiley, and getting blown to shreds by accidentally stepping on a landmine. The narrator illustrates Lemon’s story through multiple disjointed vignettes, the first memory being moments before his death, giving us poetic imagery as he writes, “I still remember that trail junction and those giant trees and a soft dripping sound somewhere beyond the trees. I remember the smell of moss. Up in the canopy, there were tiny white blossoms, but no sunlight at all, and I remember the shadows spreading out under the trees where Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley were playing catch with smoke grenades. They were just goofing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must’ve been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining… And when he died, it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms” (67). He entrances the reader into a visually magnificent beauty of nature through his perspective. Even though he’s describing Lemon’s death, he focuses on the surroundings, hinting toward the fact that among death nature remains gruesomely beautiful.
Later in the chapter, O’Brien goes more in-depth about what it means to be alive both through the Earth and as a human. Moreover, O’Brien’s narrative style and word choice help readers grasp this surreal feeling within one’s place in the world. For example when he writes, “there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost” (77). The way his narrative style shines with the added word choice using poetic melancholy verbs completely adds a never-explored feeling for some. To be able to grasp that feeling and able to explain it in a cosmically eye-opening way is what O’Brien truly captures within the chapter.
The book, The Things They Carried written by Tim O’Brien highlights the beautiful surrealness of life on Earth. He brings to life the gruesome beauty of war connecting it how the nature of life in such a profound way, leaving the readers feeling stuck in time. Tim O’Brien unleashes a new outlook on life, opening the reader’s mind to philosophies of life and what it means to be truly alive.