The Things They Carried | The Weight of War
In the following essay, this author discusses the physical and emotional weight of the Vietnam War on a group of soldiers.
Tim O'Brien first emerged on the literary scene with his starkly moving portrayals of men involved in the Vietnam War. When his award-winning novel Going After Cacciato was published, John Updike wrote that O'Brien was ‘‘reaching for a masterpiece.’’ The Things They Carried, an intense, heartfelt, moving experience of the war, published almost a decade later, may well be that masterpiece. At first critics did not know how to view The Things They Carried—as a collection of short stories or a novel? Neither, says O'Brien, who prefers to look at it simply as a...
[The entire page is 2005 words long]
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