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The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien is an American novelist well known for writing about the Vietnam War and the impact it had on the American soldiers who fought there. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 for the Vietnam novel Going After Cacciato . However, his best known work of fiction is the critically acclaimed The Things They Carried , a collection of semi-autobiographical, inter-related short-stories inspired by O'Brien's wartime experiences in Vietnam.

O'Brien has held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University-San Marcos several times, from 2003 to 2004, then from 2005 to 2006, and a third time from 2008 to 2009. Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard University and received aninternship at the Washington Post . His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home , about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "Verisimilitude," 真实性, 逼真性his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced. Although this is a common literary technique, his conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to the distinction between fact and fiction is a unique component of his writing style. In the chapter "Good Form" in The Things They Carried , O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." Story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories; for example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes", which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictional.

O'Brien won the 1979 National Book Award for Going After Cacciato .[1] His novel In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1995. His most recent novel is July, July.In August 2012, O'Brien received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award. O'Brien's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.O’Brien writes and lives in central Texas, where he raises his young sons and teaches full-time every other year at Texas State University–San Marcos. In alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the creative writing program.

内容One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader s need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. They battle the enemy (or maybe more the idea of the enemy), and occasionally each other. In their relationships we see their isolation and loneliness, their rage and fear. They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers (the old man who leads them unscathed through the mine field, the girl who grieves while she dances), and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. We hear the voices of the men and build images upon their dialogue. The way they tell stories about others, we hear them telling stories about themselves. With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in America s most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.

The Things They Carried is a collection of related stories by Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers in the Vietnam War, originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1990. The Things They Carried employs heavy use of Metafiction, as O’Brien has stated his belief that truth can be more effectively communicated that way. [1] Many of the characters are semi-autobiographical, and readers of O'Brien's work will notice that some of the characters share similarities with characters from his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. O'Brien dedicated The Things They Carried to the men of the Alpha Company with whom he fought during the war.