SOURCE: Chen, Tina. “‘Unraveling the Deeper Meaning’: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O'Brien's The Thing They Carried.” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 1 (spring 1998): 77-97.

In the following essay, Chen asserts that “exile as a fluid and inescapable experience resulting from immersion in the moral ambiguity of the Vietnam War infects all aspects of the stories” in The Things They Carried.

Tim O'Brien is obsessed with telling a true war story. Truth, O'Brien's fiction about the Vietnam experience suggests, lies not in realistic depictions or definitive accounts. As O'Brien argues, “[a]bsolute occurrence is irrelevant” because “a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth” (Things [The Things They Carried] 89). Committed to examining the relationship between the concrete and the imagined, O'Brien dismantles binaristic notions of “happening-truth” and “story-truth”: “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and...