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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
In The Things They Carried, O'Brien's style is shaped by the combination of rich figurative language and the narrator's honest, conversational tone. The stories contain a large amount of similes, metaphors, and personification, and O'Brien balances descriptive and reflective narrative portions with dialogue. Although the stories are mostly narrated in the past tense, the narrator occasionally uses the present tense when reflecting on his own storytelling.
It is clear that O'Brien pays special attention to diction, choosing words that conjure up a military atmosphere and characterize the soldiers as young men. The language is often colloquial, especially when it comes to the dialogue. This offers an impression of how American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War would have spoken to one another. Committed to authenticity, O'Brien wants to bring the reader into the real atmosphere of the war as he remembers it. He therefore offers frequent reflections on the—at times clashing—interplay between memory, storytelling, and truth. This also makes his style highly self-reflexive, as the stories drift between his flashbacks and meta-commentary on them. As such, the reader gets to know both O'Brien as a soldier in his early twenties and O'Brien as a 43-year-old writer. At times, it is challenging for the reader to separate the author from the narrator and the narrator from the character.
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