SOURCE: Heberle, Mark A. “True War Stories.” In A Trauma Artist: Tim O'Brien and the Fiction of Vietnam, pp. 176-215. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Heberle provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of The Things They Carried and locates the book within O'Brien's oeuvre.

Recirculated Trauma, Endless Fiction

After publishing his fable of nuclear age trauma in 1985, O'Brien's next novel was to have been The People We Marry, a work that eventually appeared as In the Lake of the Woods in 1994 (Kaplan 1995: 218). In the interim, however, he published several short stories, some set in Viet Nam and others in the United States but all related to the war. The shorter stories took on a life of their own and eventually a comprehensive form that became The Things They Carried, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1990, four years before the novel that was to have...