The Things They Carried

by Tim O’Brien

The Things They Carried: Genre 1 key example

How to Tell a True War Story
Explanation and Analysis:

The Things They Carried can be classified as a Vietnam War narrative from the American perspective. Although it seems fair to call the book a collection of war stories, it's not completely clear how the stories in the collection are connected to one another. In literature, the short stories in a given collection are often not at all related. In O'Brien's book, however, the stories belong to the same world and feature the same narrator and the same cast of characters. Rather than calling the book a collection of short stories, then, it seems possible for the reader to wonder whether the collection might function as a novel, with each story being a chapter. Another possibility is to see the stories as smaller vignettes from one larger narrative.