SOURCE: Calloway, Catherine. “‘How to Tell a True War Story’: Metafiction in The Things They Carried.” Critique 36, no. 4 (summer 1995): 249-57.

In the following essay, Calloway provides a stylistic analysis of The Things They Carried, regarding the volume as a work of contemporary metafiction.

Tim O'Brien's most recent book, The Things They Carried, begins with a litany of items that the soldiers “hump” in the Vietnam War—assorted weapons, dog tags, flak jackets, ear plugs, cigarettes, insect repellent, letters, can openers, C-rations, jungle boots, maps, medical supplies, and explosives as well as memories, reputations, and personal histories. In addition, the reader soon learns, the soldiers also carry stories: stories that connect “the past to the future” (40), stories that can “make the dead talk” (261), stories that “never seem … to end” (83), stories that are “beyond telling” (79), and stories “that swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the...