A Love Story, Sort of...

Tim, Linda, and Kathleen. A love story, sort of.
I find this aspect of the novel disturbing – certainly the presentation of the relationship between Tim (not Timmy) and Linda. Briefly, I’ll quote from the novel:

Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it’s tempting to dismiss is as a crush, and infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that when we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.

I just loved her.

She had poise and great dignity. Her eyes, I remember, were deep brown like her hair, and she was slender and very quiet and fragile-looking.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to meld into her bones – that kind of love. (p. 228 – I've bolded O’Brien’s italics)

Well, put together “all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love” with “I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to meld into her bones”, and I know what that kind of love is. The language is plainly sexual. Freud would have no trouble with understanding that the feelings of two nine-year-olds could be sexual. However, what troubles me is not the sexual nature of the love of these two children, it’s that the adult Tim still has sexual feelings for the permanently nine-year old Linda. “Even then” at the start of the last paragraph I quoted implies, “still now”. He still wants to “live inside her body” etc. That is suggested, again, later in the same chapter:

And then it becomes 1990. I’m forty-three years old, and a writer now, still dreaming Linda alive in exactly the same way….” (p. 245)

His feelings haven’t changed – how could they, they were already those of sexual love when he was nine. They still are. For some reason, Tim O’Brien’s puts his narrator in a position of lusting after a nine-year old. The author has, I believe, lost control of his narration at this culminating point in the novel.
This next bit I’m less sure of. I’ll continue the quotation above from where I left off:

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 then she died….(p. 245)

The point here is that the “mostly made up”, newly named Linda can only refer to one character in the novel outside of Linda herself. His daughter Kathleen. She, significantly, has just turned ten years old when Tim takes her to Vietnam to the site of Kiowa’s death. He mentions her age, I believe, in order to make the connection with Linda, who died at nine, not making it to ten. Linda lives on in Kathleen. I was disturbed by the narrator’s feelings for the child Linda. I’m further disturbed that he has these feelings, still, and that Kathleen is the embodiment of Linda. What does this say about the father/daughter relationship envisioned?

The Things They Carried

Elroy Berdahl is the author, and Jesus.
When a writer says that such things as “words can’t express” or “language is inadequate” or “words were insufficient” (p. 51), it can only mean one of two things. He’s lying, or he doesn’t understand the nature of language and thought. In this case, “narrator” Tim makes the case for the inadequacy of language, but the author clearly disagrees. I can see that from his treatment of Elroy on page 49. Elroy, though not a talker, is nonetheless a master of language – his bedroom was “cluttered with books and newspapers”; he “kills” the narrator at Scrabble (a vocabulary game) while “barely concentrating”; and most centrally, “he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.” (pp. 49-50) That’s key, it seems to me. His ability to express “large thought” concisely, even cryptically, demonstrated the author’s trust in language and its capacity. The word “cryptic” is important. It means “coded” – that is difficult to understand, perhaps even requiring a key (certainly some effort). But the idea of encryption is that the “code” can be understood completely, that meaning is fully revealed for the talented decrypter. Thus, Elroy is put into the position of novelist, conveying large thoughts in this somewhat cryptic novel. Elroy is author. And in this chapter, he is the novelist fully in control of the narrator Tim, manipulating him by way of discussion, silence and action. He brings Tim obviously and forcefully to the most important crisis thus far in his life, forcing him to decide finally to jump and swim to Canada, or to go to war. He creates the circumstances that force the choice to be made.
Some of the language and imagery surrounding Elroy and his manipulation of Tim have echoes of Christ. Elroy is a fisherman, who takes Tim to the Canadian shore while ostensibly fishing. He views his activity with Tim as a kind of fishing too. When Tim doesn’t leap for Canada, Elroy comments “Ain’t biting” -- not about the fish, but Tim. Elroy is the fisher of souls – Christ here. It’s important to see this in order to understand what seems to be a random reference to Christ earlier, as Elroy sees an owl and comments as follows:

One evening, just at sunset, he pointed up at an owl circling over the violet-lighted forest to the west.
“Hey, O”Brien,” he said. “There’s Jesus.”
The man was sharp—he didn’t miss much. Those razor eyes. (p. 50)

I don’t think it’s random. It serves to introduce the Elroy/Christ association that becomes clear as he and Tim approach Canada in the fishing boat. IT’s also important in that it gives an additional gloss to the idea of his “cryptic” stories – Christ’s parables told “large thoughts into small cryptic packets of language” as well – perhaps they’re the pre-eminent example of this for English readers.

The Things They Carried

Interesting structure of the novel. It seems to me that Tim O’Brien involves us in a narrative that’s more complex than at first appears. Of course, we all recognize that author and narrator share the same name, and some actual experiences. The author, by his repeated metafictional commentary on the “stories” presented by the narrator, continually draws our attention to this. What is interesting to me is that he also “creates” two audiences. There is an imagined readership of these various stories comprising the novel. But they aren’t us. Rather, we are in a position above them, in a more direct relationship with the “narrator” than the imagined reader will be. That’s made clear in the narrator’s comments about the writing of the Bowker story. See the paragraph on pp. 160-161. This is written to us as confidante – we are aware of “facts” about the story that its imagined readers could not know – he writes of the story of Bowker and Kiowa, saying he thinks this version is better than a previous version of the story, confiding in us that he doesn’t think Bowker would mind that he uses his real name. He continues by telling us the parts of the story that aren’t “factual” – information not given to us as readers of that story, but as, again, confidants. Again, I think this is important, as it places all of the discussions of truth and fiction on a different level than the pure “stories.” Thus, I think a “pure” story like “On the Rainy River” is written with an imagined, general reading audience in mind, while the “discussion” or “philosophical” or “how to write” sections are not written to that same audience, but rather to us, who are thereby raised above the level of the imagined reading public.

The Things They Carried

Complex narrative form – mixture of elements of fiction (see title page “A work of fiction by Tim O’Brien” as well as non-fiction (see dedication page – names the book’s fictional characters as if they were actual men). Why adopt these apparently conflicting elements?

Clearly, his purpose is in part to demonstrate that fact and truth are different, that fiction (i.e. events invented by the author) can convey truth. I’m not convinced that many need to be convinced of this, however. And, it becomes a bit of a one-trick pony, I think, as discussion of the novel continually returns to this idea.