Here Itis

Neilson’s article, Personal Trauma As Historical Amnesia in The Things They Carried provides an interesting criticism of the novel by specifically examining the death of Kiowa. Neilson explains how The Things They Carried is postmodern and because of that its contents should not be taken as a reality, or an actually feeling of what could have taken place. He closes by saying, "O'Brien's imagination is virtually the only reality. O'Brien does not contextualize his experience, does not provide us with any deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of this war, and does not see beyond his individual experience to document the vastly greater suffering of the Vietnamese. In so doing, O'Brien has constructed a text that, despite its radical aesthetic, largely reaffirms the prevailing ethnocentric conception of the war." Although this interpretation could be taken from O’Brien’s work I think that in a way this is the effect he was going for. In an interview with Martin Narparsteck in Contemporary Literature, O'Brien explains: “Literature should be looked at not for its literal truth but for its emotional qualities. What matters in literature, I think, are the pretty simple things--whether it moves me or not. Whether it feels true. The actual literal truth should be superfluous." What made The Things They Carried so remarkable is in fact the feeling O’Brien gives. Being able to somewhat feel the experiences of the war goes way beyond just O’Brien’s imagination. By demonstrating the extent to which stories and experience are all just a stretch of the imagination, O'Brien actually finds the most significant and important meaning of his time in Vietnam.